alias-panel

README

alias-panel

Spit out a simple cheat-sheet for your Bash aliases onto the CLI.

Setup

git clone https://github.com/BradyBolton/alias-panel
cd alias-panel
go build
go install

Configuring

It's probably cleaner to seperate your aliases from your .bashrc like so:

if [ -f $HOME/.bash_aliases ]; then
    . $HOME/.bash_aliases
fi

This way, you just point alias-panel to parse only those files, either by:

• Naming your files <name>_aliases, leaving the utility to pick up on any of those files found in $HOME
• Setting $ALIASFILES to a : delimited list of complete paths of your alias files (just like $PATH)

Example: I have one file $HOME/.local_aliases which contains aliases for the specific machine I'm on. I then set aside $HOME/.bash_aliases containing aliases that I use for all machines (stuffed away in a personal Git repo along with all the dotfiles). So then:

export ALIASFILES="/path/to/.bash_aliases:/path/to/.local_aliases"

The files defined in the $ALIASFILES will contain sections which alias-panel will look for as a way to group aliases together so they appear in pretty frames. Just make a comment with the SECTION directive, with an appropriate name following a colon. Any aliases underneath that section will become part of that section:

...
# SECTION: Veggies
alias carv="/usr/local/bin/carrot --version" # get carrot version
alias brov="/usr/local/bin/broccoli --version" # get broccoli version
alias pepper="emacs ${HOME}/green_is_my_pepper.org"
alias celery="firefox https://docs.celeryproject.org/en/stable/"

# SECTION: My Meats
alias eatmeats="/usr/local/bin/meat --rarity | grep "medium-rare" | eat" # eat only medium-rare meat
...

The alias carv is under the section Veggies, and so it will appear in the frame for Veggies, likewise, eatmeats falls under the My Meats section.

Running

Running the example above (yields the screenshot):

alias-panel

📜 TODO list 📜

Some very important things I need to finish:

• Stack section panels vertically, from left to right
• Make margins configurable via optional argument
• Make logging configurable via optional argument
• Account for undefined order when iterating maps in Golang
• Make things prettier (colors, bold, etc.)
• Show (optional) alias comments/descriptions (in italics)
• Add paging (with vim-like controls?)
• Add paging via CTRL-D and CTRL-U for larger jumps
• If 0 sections had space to render, should we render a cut-off section or indicate not enough space? (Or both?)
• Parsing *_aliases files is not fool proof in terms of capturing all aliases, but perhaps we can parse a call to alias and stuff them into the generic Aliases section?
• Search when hitting /?
• Use colors to highlight/indicate which Section is "current"