Glinda is a simple command line utility that helps one rank-order a moderately long list of items using a series of head-to-head matches between them. I wrote it as a quick-and-dirty way to rank 100-someodd choices for the housing lottery at my university.

The items should be listed, one to a line, in a file called options.txt; the output will be listed in result.txt when the program finishes. Simply press the [1] and [2] keys to choose the winner in each match; press [Q] to quit early.

Glinda implements the Mergesort algorithm. Mergesort was chosen because it is near-optimal in the number of comparisons required; as the user is performing comparisons manually, it was reasonable to assume that the cost of comparisons dominates all other costs. Other computations and memory usage were considered to be irrelevant in comparison (hence, a naive, recursive implementation was sufficient).

Mergesort is not nearly as robust to "mistakes" as other, tournament-style algorithms. Matches decided early on tend to have a disproportional effect on the end result, so the output should be considered a sensible starting point for tweaks, rather than a definitive ordering (unless you are 100% confident in every decision).

The code in sort.py and main.py is hereby released into the public domain, and may be used, modified, and redistributed by anyone for any purpose. getch.py is included under the terms of the Python Software Foundation (PSF) license.