A proof of concept for live previewing output of an awk command.
The application is only about 100 lines of code.
After building the binary with go build:
./awkp path_to_file
You should have awk in your path already for this to work correctly.
go install github.com/ngynkvn/awkp@latest
There's a lot of friction for new users when learning command line tools like awk, sed, and grep.
The motivation was to see how a quick feedback loop could potentially be useful for iteratively building out a command.
awk is one of those commands I quickly iterate on until I get the appropriate output.
TUI's are just quicker to pull up than an online playground, and awk was a simple target for experimenting ideas with how people interact with computers.
If you're interested in some cool TUI libraries, I recommend checking some of these:
- Go, the language and library this tool was written in,
https://github.com/rivo/tview
- This one has come to my attention recently: https://github.com/charmbracelet/bubbletea
- Rust, https://github.com/fdehau/tui-rs
- Python, https://github.com/willmcgugan/textual
Some extensions I think would be nice to have:
- Scrolling the output if it's longer than the text preview.
- Truncating the number of records returned in the preview (like
awk {print} | head -n 5) - Descriptions for the different flags that awk supports, and interative buttons / fields for setting them.