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Admin commands, the preview pane and Esc.⚓︎

Tools

tools only listed packages you installed on purpose. That left out the commands you use constantly but never installed, because they arrived with the base system: systemctl, sed, awk, dig, ip. Those belong to packages like systemd, coreutils and gawk. They are the commands most worth having a quick tldr or cheat sheet for, so they got their own list.

An editable list⚓︎

An editable list

The list is a plain text file, one command per line. Lines starting with # are ignored. Add or remove commands whenever you like. A # Heading line starts a new group:

# Network
ip
ss
curl

The 33 commands in the file, by group:

Group Commands
Your list systemctl journalctl sed awk grep tr sort uniq tee dig
Text and files find xargs cut wc head tail diff less tar
System lsblk dmesg systemd-analyze loginctl
Network ip ss curl ping ssh rsync nmcli
Permissions chmod chown stat

The file has 33 commands. Five more that were first suggested (ps, kill, lsof, df, du) were cut, and ed was dropped too.

Descriptions from the man page database.⚓︎

Descriptions from the man page database

  • whatis gives a one-line description for each command, but the first attempt returned the wrong pages for three of them:
Command Wrong page picked Why
head a C++ library page (__gnu_pbds::...) same name, section 3
ip ip (7), the kernel IPv4 page the command is ip (8)
awk awk (1p), the POSIX page Arch's awk is gawk

Two rules fixed it:

  1. Accept only an exact name match in section 1 or 8 (the command sections).
  2. If a command has no page of its own, look up the page under the name its symlink points to. awk is a link to /usr/bin/gawk, so it uses gawk's description.
#!/bin/bash
# mytools-extras - print "name<TAB>description" for each command in ~/.config/mytools/extras.txt
file="${MYTOOLS_EXTRAS:-$HOME/.config/mytools/extras.txt}"
[ -f "$file" ] || exit 0
look() { whatis "$1" 2>/dev/null | awk -v c="$1" '$1==c && $2 ~ /^\((1|8)\)$/ {sub(/^.*\([0-9a-z]+\) +- +/, ""); print; exit}'; }
grep -v '^[[:space:]]*#\|^[[:space:]]*$' "$file" | while read -r c; do
  command -v "$c" >/dev/null || continue
  d=$(look "$c")
  [ -z "$d" ] && d=$(look "$(basename "$(readlink -f "$(command -v "$c")")")")
  printf '%s\t%s\n' "$c" "[admin] ${d:-everyday command}"
done
  • Each line comes out as name<TAB>[admin] description. The [admin] tag is part of the description, so you can type admin in tools to see just this group.

Merging the lists.⚓︎

Merging the lists

  • mytools adds the extras to the package list and removes duplicates by name ( awk -F'\t' '!seen[$1]++' ), so a command that is also an installed package appears once. This is the final mytools, including the Esc behaviour described below:
#!/bin/bash
explicit=$(comm -23 <(pacman -Qeq | sort) <(pacman -Qg | awk '{print $2}' | sort -u) \
  | grep -Ev '^(lib|lib32-|python-|perl-|ruby-|ttf-|otf-|xorg-|gst-|qt[0-9]|gtk[0-9]?-)|-libs$|-docs?$')
bins=$(pacman -Ql $explicit | awk '{ if ($2 ~ /^\/usr\/bin\/[^\/]+$/) b[$1]=1; if ($2 ~ /\.desktop$/) d[$1]=1 } END { for (p in b) if (!(p in d)) print p }')
pk=$(pacman -Qi $bins | awk '/^Name/ {n=$3} /^Description/ {sub(/^Description *: /,""); print n "\t" $0}')
{ printf '%s\n' "$pk"; mytools-extras; } | awk -F'\t' '!seen[$1]++' | sort \
| column -t -s $'\t' \
| fzf --header 'Enter: mandible | ^T: tldr | ^E: cheat | ^O: man' \
      --bind 'enter:execute(mytools-help mandible {1})' \
      --bind 'ctrl-t:execute(mytools-help tldr {1})' \
      --bind 'ctrl-e:execute(mytools-help cheat {1})' \
      --bind 'ctrl-o:execute(mytools-help man {1})' \
      --bind 'esc:transform:[[ -n $FZF_QUERY ]] && echo clear-query || echo abort' \
      --preview 'mytools-preview {1}' --preview-window=right:40%

The preview pane.⚓︎

The preview pane

  • The original preview asked pacman about a package called ip, which does not exist (the command belongs to iproute2 ), so almost every admin entry showed a pacman error. A small helper now decides what to show:

  • A package: install size, install date and the commands it installs.

  • A plain command: where it lives, where a symlink leads, and which package owns it.
#!/bin/bash
# mytools-preview <name> - preview pane text for a package or a plain command
n="$1"
if pacman -Qi "$n" >/dev/null 2>&1; then
  pacman -Qi "$n" | grep -E "^(Installed Size|Install Date)"
  echo
  pacman -Ql "$n" | grep " /usr/bin/." | awk '{print $2}'
else
  p=$(command -v "$n")
  [ -z "$p" ] && { echo "not found on PATH"; exit 0; }
  r=$(readlink -f "$p")
  echo "Command: $p"
  [ "$r" != "$p" ] && echo "Links to: $r"
  owner=$(pacman -Qoq "$r" 2>/dev/null)
  [ -n "$owner" ] && echo "Package: $owner"
fi
  • For example ip shows Command: /bin/ip, Links to: /usr/bin/ip and Package: iproute2.

Esc: Clear first, then quit.⚓︎

Clear first, then quit

  • In the main list, Esc used to leave tools straight away, even in the middle of typing a search. In the multi-command picker it only closes the picker, which is why the two felt different. They are different windows: the picker is a second fzf on top of the main list, while typing a filter never opens anything.

  • Since Esc is muscle memory, the main list now uses fzf's transform action:

--bind 'esc:transform:[[ -n $FZF_QUERY ]] && echo clear-query || echo abort'
  • If there is text in the search box, Esc clears it. If the box is already empty, Esc quits. This needs a reasonably recent fzf (0.74.5 here).

Making the Keys work on admin commands.⚓︎

Making the keys work on admin commands

  • After the extras were added, pressing Ctrl+T on dig flashed the screen and returned to the list with nothing shown. The helper's first line asks mytools-bin which command to use. mytools-bin asked pacman for a package called dig. There is no such package (the command comes from bind), so it printed an empty line and the helper quietly exited.

  • The fix is one line near the top of mytools-bin: if pacman knows no package of that name but the name is a command you can run, use the name itself.

if [ -z "$bins" ] && command -v "$pkg" >/dev/null 2>&1; then echo "$pkg"; exit 0; fi
  • It was added with sed -i.bak '/^bins=/a ...', which keeps the old version as mytools-bin.bak. After that, Ctrl+T, Ctrl+E and Ctrl+O all work on the admin entries.

How it was found

Running the helper directly, outside tools, was the quickest test: mytools-help tldr dig printed nothing and returned to the prompt. A silent exit points at the first step, and the first step is the command lookup. Running a helper by itself removes fzf from the picture.

The next page covers filling the gaps, cheat sheets, and tldr pages.