GEDCOM by hand

[Philip Durbin]

Do I remember correctly that someone on this list mentioned once that
they maintain their GEDCOM file by hand?

Is that crazy talk? Is it hard? Is it possible? Any tips?

In this age of blogging like a hacker* I kind of like doing stuff by
hand if it's reasonable.

Otherwise, I guess I need to fire up GRAMPS again because my cousins
keep getting married and having babies.

Phil

* http://tom.preston-werner.com/2008/11/17/blogging-like-a-hacker.html

--
http://greptilian.com

[Mikkel Eide Eriksen]

I occasionally drop down and edit raw gedcom. Usually if I need to add the same census info to several individuals or some other repetitive task where the UI of the app isn't ideal.

Not the entire time though. That seems a nightmare.

Mikkel

Sent from an Internet phone

[Philip Durbin]

Thanks for the sanity check, Mikkel. I won't bother trying to write
GEDCOM by hand. I must be remembering wrong about previous posts to this
list.

I guess this is on my mind because I recently decided to start keeping a
list of kids and their parents in YAML so I can more easily organize
playdates based on how my kids know their friends and what activities
they enjoy: https://github.com/pdurbin/scripts/blob/master/playdates .
It's sort of a personal, offline version of
https://twitter.com/lastminuteplans

Anyway, somehow I think I'd have trouble keeping track of marriages and
children in YAML. And I doubt something like GraphML is much fun to edit
by hand.

Maybe what I need is a console tool for GEDCOM to do easy edits and
browsing. I'm pretty command line oriented. I kind of like the idea of
my GEDCOM file being my source of truth, not something I export from GRAMPS.

Phil

[Ron Savage]

Hi

I suspect there might be a few individuals who do indeed maintain their
GEDCOM file by hand, but that could be the case for any database-like file.

And surely we've all had the experience of being dis-satisfied at how
awkward some guis are to use for some tasks....

--
Ron Savage
http://savage.net.au/
Ph: 0421 920 622

[Ron Savage]

Hi

If you don't follow the Graphviz mailing list you might have missed my
post about a Perl module I wrote, GraphViz2::Marpa, which parses
Graphviz DOT files.

There are a few on-line tools for editing DOT files, and my code could
perhaps be used to write such an on-line editor. The existing editors I
gather (not having used them) are awkward to use (as per my other post).

A good editor would allow effortless joining of 2 people (nodes in DOT)
and could then ask the user about the type on connexion desired.

Patches welcome :-)).

[Philip Durbin]

Thanks, Ron. My curiosity about dot was piqued again recently when a
friend released https://github.com/larsks/dot-iptables

But back to editing GEDCOM files. LifeLines (the executable is called
llines) from http://lifelines.sourceforge.net seems to be a decent
console option. I was able to import my GEDCOM file with a couple
tweaks. It opens up your $EDITOR with a section of GEDCOM but at least
it helps you navigate around. Like GRAMPS, its source of truth is its
own database, but it exports to GEDCOM, of course. It's growing on me. :)

Phil

[Paul Johnson]

On Sat, Jan 12, 2013 at 07:54:41PM -0500, Philip Durbin wrote:

> But back to editing GEDCOM files. LifeLines (the executable is
> called llines) from http://lifelines.sourceforge.net seems to be a
> decent console option. I was able to import my GEDCOM file with a
> couple tweaks. It opens up your $EDITOR with a section of GEDCOM but
> at least it helps you navigate around. Like GRAMPS, its source of
> truth is its own database, but it exports to GEDCOM, of course. It's
> growing on me. :)

LifeLines is nice. Had I discovered it before starting Gedcom.pm,
Gedcom.pm may never have been started. And had I known that it would
receive a new lease of life later on, I would never have written
lines2perl which converts LifeLines scripts to Perl scripts using
Gedcom.pm.

As far as editing GEDCOM files is concerned, my website claims:

To store my genealogy I wrote a syntax file and use vim to enter the
data, and Gedcom.pm to validate and manipulate it. I find this to be a
nice solution.

That's still true, I suppose, though in practice I'm afraid that I don't
enter too much data nowadays. However, a big advantage of editing in
vim (or any other decent editor) is that I find it much easier to keep
my data consistent. I can use completion for names and locations. I
can copy and paste. I can treat my GEDCOM file as the database and have
complete control over it. And I can write short perl scripts to
manipulate it. So in that respect I do still find it to be a nice
solution.

--
Paul Johnson - pa...@pjcj.net
http://www.pjcj.net

[Stephen Woodbridge]

As A past user of LifeLines and a writer of quite a few of the LifeLines
Reports that lines2perl converts I think there is lots of room for both.
So thank you for Gedcom.pm. There are a lot of things that you can do
with Gedcom.pm that fit cleanly into the Perl way of doing things that
would not be easy to do with other tools.

I guess I should check out lifelines and see what they have been up to.
I like using a windows app for data entry just because I don't have to
think too much about the data entry process as it is well structured.
But for all the cool stuff I export it as a gedcom file then you Perl
from there on.

-Steve

[Philip Durbin]

> On 1/13/2013 9:30 AM, Paul Johnson wrote:

>> As far as editing GEDCOM files is concerned, my website claims:
>>
>> To store my genealogy I wrote a syntax file and use vim to enter the
>> data, and Gedcom.pm to validate and manipulate it. I find this to be a
>> nice solution.

Ah ha! So I didn't dream it. http://www.pjcj.net/perl.html#Gedcom.pm

Thanks, Paul. I'm totally going to try out your gedcom.vim for syntax
highlighting. LifeLines opens your $EDITOR, which for me is vim. :)

Thanks for your input too, Steve. I think it's time for me to subscribe
to the mailing list at http://lifelines.sourceforge.net

Phil

--
http://greptilian.com