zimski / ssam

small command line tool to manage aliases and scripts

ssam

ssam stands for small scripts and aliases manager. it is a command line tool that helps you manage you scripts and snippets to manage aliases and scripts.

Features :

• Fuzzy search command line interface based on skim to search through your aliases (think fzf, peco or skim).
• Your scripts and aliases can be in version control and still be available in your bashrc.
• Generates configuration for bash and zsh automatically.
• Your aliases can be templated using variables and ssam will guide you and ask you to choose a value for each variable before runing your alias.

Getting started :

Run cargo run run on the root of this repository to see a demo.

Initial configuration :

Fist, you want to start by creating a repository that will hold your scripts and aliases. Ideally, we recommend it's stucture to be as follow :

├── aliases.yaml
├── scripts
│   └── fancy_ls.sh
└── vars.yaml

Once it's done, you can continue by editing a configuration file in $HOME/.ssam_rc.toml that should look as follow:

scripts_dir="./examples/oneliners/scripts"
aliases_file="./examples/oneliners/aliases.yaml"
vars_file="./examples/oneliners/vars.yaml"

Alias management:

the aliases.yaml file can look like this :

- name: list stuff
  desc: list current directory. 
  alias: cd {{directory}} && {{pager}} {{file}}

you can use the {{ variable }} syntax to refer to variables defined in your vars_file

ssam will first prompt your for a choice for each dependant variable. Once this is done, it will replace each variable with it's corresponding choice and run the resulting command.

Variables :

in your vars_file, you can define variables. variables can either have a static list of choices or can get their choices dynamically by running a command. the from_command option expects one choice per line in the output command.

- name: directory
  desc: an example variable
  choices:
    - value: /etc/default
      desc: etc default directory
    - value: /etc
      desc: etc directory

- name: pager
  desc: the pager tool to use
  choices: 
    - value: less
      desc: use less
    - value: cat
      desc: use cat


- name: file
  desc: file selection
  from_command: ls -1 {{ directory }}

Scripts management

ssam will index your scripts as follow :

• name: will be the filename of you script.
• description: will be the the second line of your script.

Therefore, you scripts should look as follow :

#!/bin/sh (anything other interpreter can be used here.)
# some small description
...the content of the script.