try, lineselect, pipx, and copier

I’m really excited about some of the tools in this issue. Enjoy!

try

This lets you prefix any command line operation with try and it sandboxes it so you can observe what will happen without actually doing it. It’s essentially a dry-run for any command. Once the sandboxed command is finished running, you can choose to “commit” (actually do) the command outside the sandbox.

Repo: https://github.com/binpash/try

LineSelect

If you’re familiar with piping and xargs this adds an element of interactivity which I am a fan of. Essentially you pipe a command into lineselect and it will print out the output of the command and wait for you to select which lines you want forwarded onto the next command. Their readme is really good and includes a video showcase but the minimal example is listing files, selecting which ones to delete, and then deleting them:

ls | lineselect | xargs rm

So ls runs and has it’s normal output except that you can select which lines you want piped to rm. To enable this it seems to ensure stdout is always in single column mode. I’m not sure how it does this but it’s pretty cool.

I’ve offered to package this for the developer so it can be installed without the end user needing to install node.

Repo: https://github.com/chfritz/lineselect

pipx

Installs isolated python applications. In the readme they draw the comparison between themselves and other package managers like apt. Another quote from their readme:

In a way, [pipx] turns Python Package Index (PyPI) into a big app store for Python applications.

I have seen a number of recent cli tools being distributed this way. I have a good example of this just below…

Repo: https://github.com/pypa/pipx

Copier

This is a slick tool for rendering project templates. I’ve been wanting something like this for quickly spinning up new projects. I’ve always disliked the workflow where you clone a “template” repository which is actually just a collection of files then have to go through and rename a bunch of stuff. Doing this means you inherit the git history (annoying) and the alternative is to clone the repo, delete the .git folder, and then re-initialize the repo. This is a pain as well.

Copier is available as a CLI app via pipx (pipx install copier) and you can then spin up a new project with copier copy <my-template> my/new-project. Two neat things here:

1. the template can be a git url. No more local copy of a template necessary!
2. you can update a project to the latest version of the template with copier update. This is a really nice feature. Say you have a bunch of python projects and you change the CI in the template you no longer have to go manually change it everywhere.

Repo: https://github.com/copier-org/copier