Ultimate Plumber is a tool for writing Linux pipes with instant live preview
It's a new CLI tool I've recently written, and it reached a Top 1 position on HN just after the public release.
It works with other classic CLI tools by boosting the speed with which they can be composed together. It's especially useful for quick exploration of logs, CSV files, and other text files or pipelines.
Um; I feel it's kinda as if you asked if a dog is like rhinoceros... How do I even answer that? Simplest answer is: "no, it's not"; though if you squint your eyes super hard, you could see some kind of vague resemblance, maybe?
Have you seen the readme? There's an animated gif showing how it works, and a more detailed description.
> interactively and incrementally explore textual data
Just like less.
> This is achieved by boosting any typical Linux text-processing utils such as grep, sort, cut, paste, awk, wc, perl, etc., etc., by providing a quick, interactive, scrollable preview of their results.
Yep, that's less.
> use PgUp/PgDn and Ctrl-[←]/Ctrl-[→] for basic browsing through the command output;
Sure that's not like less? You can even start searching results of a high output command immediately after the pipe.
Ahahah, lol, ok, get it :D So, apparently I totally reinvented less, I concede :)
To say even more, it's actually very much a crippled less (not all of its functions available!). With just one feature added, namely:
> in the input box at the top of the screen, start writing any bash pipeline; then press Enter to execute the command you typed, and the Ultimate Plumber will immediately show you the output of the pipeline in the scrollable window.
At least for me personally, it was painfully worth reimplementing the crippled less functionalities for this single little addition. Though I do admit I felt the lack of the slash-to-search feature of less already yesterday when using up...
And, to explain myself a bit, I really tried my best at explaining the tool in the readme... it's just that I can't currently think of any better wording :( If by any chance you had some idea/suggestion how you think I could improve it, I'd be super eager to hear it! I'm kinda too deep in the trenches to be able to look at it from a distance, so even seemingly obvious (to you) comments (as the one with the comparison to less, after you explained it) are sincerely valuable to me!
I haven't used the command, but from what I understand, it is like a shell with less-like interface that you can pipe to, and work on a copy of the output stream.
I guess one way to articulate what you are doing is building /up/ more commands in a step by step fashion with immediate feedback. It is not necessarily a bad thing, especially if processing or preparation times for the input are long. However, you could also accomplish the same thing with a smaller sample size and repeatedly applying your commands using a regular shell instead of an interactive less.
Ultimate Plumber is a tool for writing Linux pipes with instant live preview
It's a new CLI tool I've recently written, and it reached a Top 1 position on HN just after the public release. It works with other classic CLI tools by boosting the speed with which they can be composed together. It's especially useful for quick exploration of logs, CSV files, and other text files or pipelines.