thelm

Thelm

Selection narrowing tool for the terminal. The basic idea is the adapted from Emacs-helm.

To see thelm in action, the following use cases contain animations:

• Running ag or git-grep continuously
• Insert a command to prompt from history
• Choose directory where to jump from directory stack

Installation

$ go get github.com/kopoli/thelm

Alternatively you can download one of the pre-compiled releases.

Usage

Basic operation is the following:

• Reads data from:

  • Running given command repeatedly.
  • A pipe.
  • A file.

• User is able to select a line visually with a termbox-go user interface.

• The line is printed out to stdout.

Command line

$ ./thelm --help

Usage: ./thelm [OPTIONS] [-- ARG...]

Helm for terminal

Arguments:
  ARG                         Command to be run

Options:
  -v, --version               Show the version and exit
  -f, --filter                Start filtering after running command.
  -d, --default               The default argument that will be printed out if aborted.
  -i, --hide-initial          Hide command given at the command line.
  -s, --single-arg            Regard input given in the UI as a single argument to the program.
  -r, --relaxed-regexp        Regard input as a relaxed regexp. Implies --single-arg.
  -t, --title                 Title string in UI. (default "./thelm")
  -F, --file                  The file which will be read instead of running a command.
  -P, --pipe                  The data will be read through a pipe.
      --licenses              Show licenses of ./thelm.
      --cpu-profile-file      The CPU profile would be saved to this file.
      --memory-profile-file   The Memory profile would be saved to this file.

Concepts:

• Filtering means that the current input can be filtered/narrowed down grep -style. This can be toggled with a key binding. If the -f flag is given, the data is read once (or a command is run once) and then it is filtered within thelm.

• Default argument is what is printed out if user aborts out of the UI. If this is not supplied, nothing is printed.

• Hiding initial arguments means that the user can give a part of the command from the command line and the rest in the UI. See for an example in Running ag or git-grep continuously.

• Single argument is used when the part of the command line given in the UI is wanted to be given to the called program as a single argument. Without this, whitespace delimited fields are interpret as separate arguments.

• Reading from a file is invoked with the -F flag.

• Reading from a pipe is invoked with the -P flag.

Key bindings within the narrowing UI

Use cases

Insert a command to prompt from history

This is comparable to the "C-r" binding in bash and zsh. I have only zsh configuration for this setup. It can be found here. This is configured to "Meta-," keybinding by default.

Choose directory where to jump from directory stack

The ZSH configuration is in here. It uses "Meta-." key binding by default.

Running ag or git-grep continuously

$ ./thelm --hide-initial --single-arg ag

This is marginally useful from the terminal. Obviously I prefer helm-grepint for Emacs.

License

MIT license