tersen

Tersen is a fast, flexible abbreviation engine that compresses text in a human-readable fashion. Abbreviations are entirely user-specifiable through a dictionary of textual mappings (e.g., and becomes &). More concise dictionary files and custom abbreviation behavior can be obtained by writing Lua functions called annotations (which pre-process lines in the abbreviation dictionary) and hooks (which alter tersen’s behavior as it abbreviates a text).

Use cases for tersen include:

  • Packing more information onto a cheat sheet or reference guide.

  • Sending content over SMS or another limited-bandwidth communication channel.

  • Obfuscating content so others cannot easily read it but you can.

  • Practicing your reading skills in your favorite alphabetic shorthand system.

Tersen is written and extended in Lua. It uses the MIT license. You can install it using LuaRocks:

$ luarocks install tersen