navi - turn command-line cheatsheets into Alfred actions!

[denisidoro]

navi  

An interactive cheatsheet tool for the command-line and Alfred.

Download link and instructions: https://github.com/denisidoro/navi
 

navi allows you to browse through cheatsheets (that you may write yourself or download from maintainers) and execute commands. Argument suggestions are prompted to you.

Pros

• it will make you type less;
• it will spare you from knowing CLIs by heart;
• it will teach you new one-liners.
   

It uses fzf, skim, or Alfred under the hood and it can be either used as a command or as a shell widget (à la Ctrl-R).
 

This project was originally intended to be used in the terminal but I found out that it was quicker to call most actions via Alfred instead.

[deanishe]

This is a really good idea, but I had to edit the workflow quite a bit to make it useable.

 

The workflow is fundamentally broken on my machine (navi: command not found) because I don't use bash. Sourcing ~/.bashrc does nothing. This is probably true of all new Macs (as well as many older ones) because zsh is now the default shell.

 

So I replaced all calls to navi with $navi and set a workflow variable set to the full path to navi instead.

 

I've also replaced the Terminal Command with a Copy to Clipboard action. When I'm looking up a shell command, 99% of the time, I want to paste it into my current shell (and possibly edit it before running), not start a new shell and run the command there unchanged.

 

I've also added a Snippet Trigger, so I can call the workflow directly from my shell (the Alfred interface is nicer than the fzf one).

[denisidoro]

@deanishe, thanks for the comments!

1) the `~/.bashrc` loading is to add binaries installed via Homebrew to your $PATH (assuming that you used Homebrew to install navi + Homebrew is configured for your bash session)
2) would you mind opening a PR? I'll gladly accept any improvements
3) given your use case, you'll probably be more interested in the shell widget: https://github.com/denisidoro/navi#shell-widget

[vitor]

If you’re the author of the original tool, why don’t you just bundle it in the Workflow?

[denisidoro]

What do you mean, @vitor? To bundle the `navi` binary with the workflow?

That would work, but navi heavily relies on env vars and stuff, so you probably want to source `~/.bashrc` in both cases. And if you're going to source `~/.bashrc` then it's best to have navi installed globally because that will work in the terminal as well.

Does that make sense?

[Acidham]

5 hours ago, deanishe said:

This is a really good idea, but I had to edit the workflow quite a bit to make it useable.

 

@deanishe did you PR the changes or can you share the WF with your mods?

[deanishe]

4 hours ago, denisidoro said:

1) the `~/.bashrc` loading is to add binaries installed via Homebrew to your $PATH (assuming that you used Homebrew to install navi + Homebrew is configured for your bash session)

 

I understand what your goal was. I was explaining why it doesn’t work and how I fixed it. As far as I can tell (please correct me if I'm wrong), the workflow doesn’t need to actually alter $PATH, it just needs to know where the navi binary is, in which case, sourcing shell dotfiles is overkill and also not guaranteed to work. Use /usr/local/bin/navi instead of just calling navi, or if you want to be friendly to users who didn't install it via Homebrew, add a workflow variable and use $navi.

 

Sourcing dotfiles in a workflow if you don’t absolutely need to is generally a bad idea. You don’t know which shell the user uses, so there's a good chance you’ll source the wrong file. Some users will add [ -z "$PS1" ] && return at the top of their shell’s config file so it does nothing in non-interactive contexts, and others will include so much stuff in there that it takes a really long time to load, massively slowing down your workflow.

 

4 hours ago, denisidoro said:

2) would you mind opening a PR? I'll gladly accept any improvements

 

I'll submit a PR that replaces the bashrc sourcing tomorrow.

 

4 hours ago, denisidoro said:

3) given your use case, you'll probably be more interested in the shell widget

 

I have the shell widget, which outputs commands in the way I prefer, but like you, I also prefer the Alfred interface. So I changed my copy of the workflow to insert the command at the current cursor, like the shell widget does.

Edited May 7, 2020 by deanishe

[deanishe]

17 minutes ago, Acidham said:

did you PR the changes or can you share the WF with your mods?

 

Not yet. I’ll PR the changes for setting the right path to navi tomorrow. That’s a pure fix and doesn’t change the way the workflow actually behaves.

 

I don't know whether @denisidoro is interested in changing the behaviour of the workflow (copying/pasting the command instead of or as an alternative to running it in a new shell). And if he is, the proper way to do it would be to make all the options available via modifiers, which I haven't done. That might require changing the Rust code, and Rust is strictly a read-only language for me.

Edited May 7, 2020 by deanishe