panopticas

Panopticas helps understand file types with metadata tags, similar to tools like enry and linguist

The core functionality is a language detector and metadata identifier, based on the filename extension, filename details and the shebang line.

Why another detector?

The metadata tagging is where panopticas differs from other tools.

Some files have a “langauge” like XML or YAML, but the filetype is actually a specific product file.

For example:

pom.xml is a Maven project file, but the language is XML.
package.json is a Node.js project file, but the language is JSON.
requirements.txt is a pip project file, but the language is text.
.github/workflows/python.yml is a GitHub Actions workflow file, but the language is YAML, but it’s specific to GitHub Actions.

Panopticas helps provide more context for files that are not just a language, but a specific product file.

pip install panopticas

Change into the directory you want check the file types of and then run

panopticas assess

To check a single file and get some metadata

panopticas file FILENAME

Check out the simple explanation of the API reference, and if you need more detail, check out the few python classes in /src/panopticas/