kidd / termidash

dash docsets browser for plain terminal using fzf

Termidash

1 What

Termidash is an attempt to get a dash docsets browser from the terminal using fzf to pick from the options.

This repo contains a few tests and trials about how to achieve a neat experience without coding for the corner cases, but in a stream oriented way, using pipes, and maybe using the help of some temporary file.

The whole story starts when developing https://www.github.com/areina/helm-dash, that the application itself seems like it should be just a pipe of:

list -> chose(fzf) -> open-doc

The fact that unix pipes do not allow to pass any other datatype than strings, and the separator is \n, makes it difficult to “hide” information in the middle steps that would be recovered afterwards.

I thought I’d need something like a shwartzian transform but for pipes.

I also got to something semi useful with just 5 lines of bash, but the experience is not really smooth, so I wanted to try some other approaches to the same problem

Here are the 5 lines that kinda solve the problem.

function search() {
   ds=$(ls ~/.docsets/**/*dsidx | fzf)
   sqlite3 $ds 'select * from searchIndex' |
   cut -d\| -f 2 |
   fzf --preview "lynx $(dirname $ds)/Documents/{}" |
   xargs -I{} sqlite3 $ds "select path from searchIndex where name = '{}'" XA -I{} google-chrome "$(dirname $ds)/Documents/{}" }

So this repo contains:

• a racket app that mimics helm-dash user experience.
• a bash directory with another app that mimics the helm-dash experience.
• https://github.com/flonatel/pipexec trial and error.