// the find
stephencelis/syn
Syntax control for the command line
A macOS command-line tool that uses Apple's NLP APIs to tag and highlight parts of speech in text — nouns, verbs, adverbs, and so on. Useful for writers who want to audit their prose (spot adverb overuse, find all proper names) or for piping text through scripts. It's a niche writing tool, not a developer productivity tool.
Uses NSLinguisticTagger, which is surprisingly good for English prose analysis — better than most open-source POS taggers at the time. Three output formats (ANSI, table, JSON) make it scriptable. The JSON output in particular makes it easy to pipe into other tools. CLI design is clean and follows Unix conventions.
Abandoned in 2015 and built against OS X 10.7-era APIs — NSLinguisticTagger was deprecated by Apple in macOS 12 in favor of NaturalLanguage.framework, so this likely doesn't build cleanly on anything recent. macOS-only and requires Xcode to build from source. The Pods directory is committed to the repo, which is messy. 379 stars over 11 years with zero forks activity says everything about its current relevance.