108 posts tagged “cli”
Command-line interface tools and how to build them.
2019
How FZF and ripgrep improved my workflow (via) I’m already a keen user of ripgrep (a crazy-fast grep alternative) but fzf was new to me: it’s a CLI utility that lets you pipe in a list of strings, then gives you a typeahead search interface to search and select a string before returning the selected string to stdout when you hit enter. This means you can pipe it together with other tools to add a dynamic selection step, which has all kinds of delightful combinations. “vi $(find . | fzf)” for example opens vi against the file you selected.
ripgrep is faster than {grep, ag, git grep, ucg, pt, sift}
(via)
Andrew Gallant's post from September 2016 introducing ripgrep, the command-line grep tool he wrote using Rust (on top of the Rust regular expression library also written by Andrew). ripgrep is a beautifully designed CLI interface and is crazy fast, and this post describes how it gets its performance in a huge amount of detail, right down to comparing the different algorithmic approaches used by other similar tools.
I recently learned that ripgrep ships as part of VS Code, which is why VS Code's search-across-project feature is so fast. In fact, if you dig around in the OS X package you can find the rg binary already installed on your mac:
find /Applications/Visual* | grep bin/rg
tsv-utils (via) Powerful collection of CLI tools for processing TSV files, written in D for performance and released by eBay. Includes a csv2tsv conversion tool. You can download an archive of pre-built binaries for Linux and OS X from their releases page: worked fine on my Mac.
csv-diff 0.3.1 (via) I released a minor update to my csv-diff CLI tool today which does a better job of displaying a human-readable representation of rows that have been added or removed from a file—previously they were represented as an ugly JSON dump. My script monitoring changes to the official list of trees in San Francisco has been running for a month now and has captured 23 commits!
sqlite-utils: a Python library and CLI tool for building SQLite databases
sqlite-utils is a combination Python library and command-line tool I’ve been building over the past six months which aims to make creating new SQLite databases as quick and easy as possible.
[... 1,237 words]db-to-sqlite (via) I just released version 0.2 of a tiny CLI utility I’ve been working on. It builds on top of SQLAlchemy and lets you connect to any SQLAlchemy-supported database and convert the data from it to a local SQLite database file. The new --all option will mirror all available tables (including foreign key relationships), or you can use --sql to save the results of custom SQL queries.
2018
Datasette: publish_subcommand hook + default plugins mechanism, used for publish heroku/now (via) I just landed a new plugin hook to Datasette master: publish_subcommand, which lets you define new publisher subcommands for the “datasette publish” CLI tool in addition to Heroku and Zeit Now. As part of this I’ve refactored the heroku/now publisher implementations into two default plugins that ship as part of Datasette—I hope to use this pattern for other core functionality in the future.
GaretJax/django-click (via) I’ve been using Click to write command-line tools in Python recently (big datasette and csvs-to-sqlite use it) and its a delightful way of composing simple and complex CLI interfaces. I’ve always found Django’s default management command syntax hard to fit in my head—django-click means I can combine the two.
2017
Datasette: instantly create and publish an API for your SQLite databases
I just shipped the first public version of datasette, a new tool for creating and publishing JSON APIs for SQLite databases.
[... 968 words]2009
Woof—simply exchange files (via) Ultra simple file sharing for local networks: run “woof filename” to start a local web server which will serve up that file, just once, and then terminate. Can also serve up an entire directory as a compressed archive. Written in Python, as a single script which you can drop in to your ~/bin. “woof -s” serves the script itself, so you can easily pass it to someone who has a file you want.
From Microsoft: C# and CLI under the Community Promise. Microsoft’s assurance that it won’t “assert its Necessary Claims” against alternative (including open source) implementations of the ECMA C# and CLR specifications. The promise doesn’t cover implementations of .NET, WinForms etc- so the Mono team have announced they will be splitting their project in to two packages—a safe, ECMA based package and a package containing everything else.
Perl 6: The MAIN sub (via) "Calling subs and running a typical Unix program from the command line is visually very similar: you can have positional, optional and named arguments." - that's exactly what I was thinking when I came up with optfunc.
optfunc. Command line parsing libraries in Python such as optparse frustrate me because I can never remember how to use them without consulting the manual. optfunc is a new experimental interface to optparse which works by introspecting a function definition (including its arguments and their default values) and using that to construct a command line argument parser. Feedback and suggestions welcome!
aws—simple access to Amazon EC2 and S3. The best command line client I’ve found for EC2 and S3. “aws put --progress my-bucket-name/large-file.tar.gz large-file.tar.gz” is particularly useful for uploading large files to S3. Written in Perl (with no dependencies), shelling out to curl to do the heavy lifting.
resty. 58 lines of bash provides a better command-line interface to RESTful APIs, using curl under the hood. This should save me from running “man curl” several times a week.
A Unix Utility You Should Know About: Pipe Viewer. Useful command line utility that adds a progress bar to any unix pipeline.
2008
lns (via) “a friendly program for making symbolic links”—it’s ln -s but it does the right thing no matter what order you put the arguments in. Love it.
2007
TweetyPy. A Python-based CLI client for Twitter, by Stuart Colville