Flatten

Flatten is a tool for creating a repository structure file and a flattened repository file.

This is particularly useful for coding, e.g. with Cursor, where you can include your folder structure within a chat to ground the model.

Watch the YouTube demo.

Installation

To use the Flatten tool, copy the flatten repo fr.sh script into your repository:

curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/TrelisResearch/flatten/main/fr.sh
chmod +x fr.sh

Usage

Generate Repository Structure

To generate or update the repository structure file:

./fr.sh

This will create a repo_structure.yaml file in the current directory, containing the structure of your repository.

Flatten Repository Contents

To generate the repository structure and flatten the contents of text files:

./fr.sh --ffc

This will create both repo_structure.yaml and flattened_repo.txt files. The latter will contain the contents of all text files in the repository.

Features

• Ignores files and directories listed in .gitignore and .flattenignore
• Automatically excludes the fr.sh script itself from flattening
• Supports a wide range of text file formats commonly used in programming, including:
  • Web development (js, ts, jsx, tsx, vue, html, css, scss, less)
  • Backend languages (py, rb, php, java, go, rs, c, cpp, h, hpp, cs, swift, kt, scala)
  • Data formats (json, yaml, yml, xml, sql, graphql)
  • Scripting languages (sh, bash, zsh)
  • Other languages (r, m, f, f90, jl, lua, pl, pm, t, ps1, bat, asm, s, nim, ex, exs, clj, lisp, hs, erl, elm)
  • Documentation (md, txt)
• Skips binary files when flattening
• Includes text files from all directories in the repository

Note

Ensure you run the script from the root of your repository for accurate results.