Sometimes I find myself needing to code something for Indigo, the macOS home automation application, and I would like to have my list of devices available. Rather than connect to my Indigo server to look up each device’s name or ID, it would be convenient to have a list at hand whenever I need it.

You can run the following script in the Indigo scripting shell, opened via Plugins > Open Scripting Shell in Indigo. The script exports device names, IDs, and descriptions to a CSV file, sorted alphabetically by folder and then by device name. Device descriptions appear in the Notes column. Devices outside a folder appear under (no folder).

Replace YOUR_USER_NAME in output_path with your macOS account’s short username. The file is written to the Desktop on the Mac running the scripting shell; you can change the path to another existing, writable folder if you prefer. Running the script again overwrites the previous export.

import csv

folders = {}

for folder in indigo.devices.folders:
    folders[folder.id] = folder.name

folders[0] = "(no folder)"  # unfiled devices

output_path = "/Users/YOUR_USER_NAME/Desktop/indigo_devices_by_folder.csv"

rows = []
for dev in indigo.devices:
    folder_name = folders.get(dev.folderId, f"Unknown folder {dev.folderId}")
    rows.append((folder_name, dev.name, dev.id, dev.description))

rows.sort(key=lambda r: (r[0].lower(), r[1].lower()))

with open(output_path, "w", newline="") as f:
    writer = csv.writer(f)
    writer.writerow(["Folder", "Device", "Device ID", "Notes"])
    writer.writerows(rows)

indigo.server.log(f"Wrote {len(rows)} devices to {output_path}")

The resulting CSV gives me a searchable reference that I can keep open in a spreadsheet while writing Indigo scripts. It is a snapshot of the device list, so I just rerun the export after adding, renaming, or moving devices to keep it current.

If you have questions or suggestions, please get in touch through my contact page.

I often include quotations in blog posts, but a plain Markdown blockquote does not give much control over the presentation and attribution. I wanted a reusable component that would keep the quote, author, source and publication year visually consistent without requiring me to reproduce the same HTML in every post.

The result is a fancy_quote shortcode, which adds large typographic quotation marks, centres the source and author beneath the quotation, and allows one or more passages to be highlighted with a simple ==highlighted text== notation.

Features

• The quotation can be written between the shortcode’s opening and closing tags or supplied through a text parameter.
• author, source and year are optional named parameters.
• Any number of ranges can be highlighted.
• Highlighted passages use the semantic HTML <mark> element rather than a purely decorative <span>.
• Highlights can wrap across lines without losing their padding.
• Existing quotations without highlights continue to render normally.
• The appearance is controlled entirely by CSS and can be adapted to any theme.

Hugo version

The shortcode requires Hugo 0.16 or newer. The limiting feature is replaceRE, which converts the highlight delimiters into <mark> elements and was added in the Hugo 0.16 release. The other pieces use the standard shortcode .Get and .Inner methods and the long-established safeHTML alias for safe.HTML.

I developed and tested this version with Hugo 0.165.0. It does not require Hugo Extended, JavaScript, or any external library.

The shortcode

Create layouts/shortcodes/fancy_quote.html in the root of the Hugo project:

{{ $year := .Get "year" }}
{{ $text := .Get "text" | default .Inner }}
{{ $author := .Get "author" }}
{{ $source := .Get "source" }}
{{ $text = replaceRE `==([^=]+?)==` `<mark class="quote-highlight">$1</mark>` $text }}

<div class="fancy-quote">
  <p class="quote-text">{{ $text | safeHTML }}</p>

  {{ if or $source $year }}
  <div class="quote-meta">
    {{ if $source }}
    <span class="quote-source">{{ $source }}</span>
    {{ end }}
    {{ if $year }}
    <span class="quote-year">({{ $year }})</span>
    {{ end }}
  </div>
  {{ end }}

  {{ if $author }}
  <div class="quote-author">{{ $author }}</div>
  {{ end }}
</div>

The regular expression looks for text enclosed by pairs of equals signs. Each match is replaced by a <mark class="quote-highlight"> element. Piping the result through safeHTML prevents Hugo from escaping the generated element.

safeHTML should be used only with content that I control. If quotation text comes from an untrusted visitor, CMS user, or external feed, it should be sanitised rather than passed through this shortcode unchanged.

The CSS

Here is the complete stylesheet:

.fancy-quote {
  font-family: "Georgia", "Times New Roman", serif;
  line-height: 1.6;
  max-width: 100%;
}

.quote-text {
  position: relative;
  text-align: justify;
  margin-bottom: 1rem;
  padding: 0.2rem 2.4rem 0.35rem;
  font-size: 1.05rem;
}

.quote-text::before,
.quote-text::after {
  position: absolute;
  color: #999;
  font-size: 2.75rem;
  font-weight: bold;
  line-height: 1;
}

.quote-text::before {
  content: "“";
  top: -0.15rem;
  left: 0.8rem;
}

.quote-text::after {
  content: "”";
  right: 0;
  bottom: -0.8rem;
}

.quote-highlight {
  color: inherit;
  background-color: #fff0a6;
  padding: 0.05em 0.12em;
  -webkit-box-decoration-break: clone;
  box-decoration-break: clone;
}

.quote-meta {
  display: flex;
  justify-content: center;
  align-items: baseline;
  gap: 0.25em;
  text-align: center;
  line-height: 1.3;
}

.quote-year {
  font-style: normal;
  font-size: 1.25rem;
  white-space: nowrap;
}

.quote-source {
  font-style: italic;
  font-size: 1.25rem;
}

.quote-author {
  display: block;
  text-align: center;
  margin-top: 0.25rem;
  margin-left: auto;
  margin-right: auto;
  font-size: 1.1rem;
}

The stylesheet can be saved as static/css/fancy-quote.css and included in the site’s <head>:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="/css/fancy-quote.css">

Sites already using Hugo Pipes can instead keep the file under assets/css and add it to their existing CSS bundle.

Using the shortcode

A complete quotation looks like this:

{{< fancy_quote
  author="James C. Scott"
  source="Two Cheers for Anarchism"
  year="2012" >}}
The point is simply that ==huge disparities in wealth, property, and status make a mockery of freedom.== A second range can be ==highlighted independently==.
{{< /fancy_quote >}}

The highlight markers are optional. Without them, the entire quotation is displayed in the same style:

{{< fancy_quote author="Ursula K. Le Guin" >}}
The creative adult is the child who survived.
{{< /fancy_quote >}}

For a short quotation, the text can be supplied as a parameter and the closing tag omitted:

{{< fancy_quote
  text="The creative adult is the child who survived."
  author="Ursula K. Le Guin"
>}}

Optional adaptations

The shortcode parameters are independent. A quote can have an author but no source, a source and year but no author, or no attribution at all. The highlighting feature is also entirely optional.

The CSS is deliberately uncomplicated. The highlight colour can be changed through background-color, and the font, quotation-mark size, spacing and attribution alignment can all be altered without touching the shortcode. A dark theme might override the highlight colour inside its existing dark-mode media query:

@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) {
  .quote-highlight {
    background-color: #665500;
  }
}

The shortcode intentionally treats its inner text as text with optional highlight markers, rather than running it through the Markdown renderer. That keeps its output predictable. If links, emphasis or other Markdown inside quotations become necessary, the rendering step could be extended with Hugo’s Page.RenderString method, with suitable care around generated and untrusted HTML.

For my purposes, this provides a small, readable content syntax while keeping all of the presentational machinery in one reusable place. If you have any difficulties, suggestions for improvements, please contact me via my contact page