drujensen / alt

Command line tool to find alternate files

Alt

alt is a command line utility that attempts to find the "alternate path" for the provided path. This is primarily intended for developers. It is written in Rust. Hence, it is compiled and distributed as a binary.

It was originally written to alternate files in vim, but has no dependency on vim at all and can be used in many other scenarios as it is just a command line utility.

Its interface is as simple as they come.

• Pass it a path as the first argument
• It will print the alternate path to standard out

For example:

$ alt spec/app/queues/fee/user_fee_submission_spec.rb
app/queues/fee/user_fee_submission.rb

For advanced usage, full reference of the command line interface, and frequently asked questions please refer to the Wiki.

Installation

To install on Mac OS X or (MacOS) we provide a Homebrew tap which provides the alt formula. You can use it by doing the following:

Add the Tap

brew tap "codebreakdown/homebrew-oss"

brew install

brew install codebreakdown/oss/alt

If you are on a platform other than Mac OS X or (MacOS) you will have to build your own version from source.

Use with Vim

There's no vim plugin. It may not end up needing one; we'll see. For now, you can just stick the code below in your .vimrc to invoke alt with <leader>.. Note that alt and the Vim Script example below work in both the terminal based Vim and GUI based Vim like MacVim.

" Run a given vim command on the results of alt from a given path.
" See usage below.
function! AltCommand(path, vim_command)
  let l:alternate = system("alt " . a:path)
  if empty(l:alternate)
    echo "No alternate file for " . a:path . " exists!"
  else
    exec a:vim_command . " " . l:alternate
  endif
endfunction

" Find the alternate file for the current path and open it
nnoremap <leader>. :w<cr>:call AltCommand(expand('%'), ':e')<cr>