1 .TH "SELECTOR" "1.1.7" "July 2012" "Francois Fleuret" "User Commands"
3 \" This man page was written by Francois Fleuret <francois@fleuret.org>
4 \" and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike
9 selector \- A simple command line utility for dynamic pattern selection
13 \fBselector\fP [\fIoptions\fR] [\fI<filename1>\fR [\fI<filename2>\fR ...]]
17 \fBselector\fP is a command line utility for interactive real-time
18 pattern matching. It reads the content of the specified files, and as
19 the user types a list of strings separated by ";" (or a regexp), the
20 display is updated in real time to show only the lines containing all
21 the said strings (or matching the regexp).
23 This command was mainly designed as a way to search efficiently in the
24 shell history, for which it is substantially better than the standard
25 readline ^R binding. With the -v option, it injects the selected line
26 into the tty input buffer, hence allowing the user to edit the line
27 and execute it as a standard command.
29 Selector is also a handy tool to test regexps, or to display menus
30 with many possible choices. For the latter, the -x option allows to
31 specify a label delimiter: the part of each line before that character
32 will appear during the selection, but only the part after that
33 character will be returned.
35 Note that because this is an interactive command, the standard input
36 can not be used as one of the input files.
38 .SH "USING SELECTOR IN BASH"
40 The selector command comes with a shell script for bash. If you add
44 source bash-selector.sh --hist --cd
48 in your \fB~/.bashrc\fR, it will remap M-r to the smart history search,
49 and redefine cd so that M-c provides a smart cd history.
53 Keys corresponding to ASCII codes between " " and "~" add a character
54 to the pattern string. The Backspace key, "^H" and "^?" delete the
55 character immediately on the left of the cursor, while the Delete key
56 and "^D" delete the character at cursor location.
58 The Left and Right cursor keys move the editing cursor
59 accordingly. The Up and Down cursor keys move the selected line one
60 entry at a time, and PageUp and PageDown move it by ten entries. The
61 Home and End key move to the top and the bottom of the list
62 respectively. The return key selects the current line and exits.
64 The keys "^A", "^E", "^U", and "^K" do somehow what they do in
65 readline, and you can exit selector without doing anything by either
66 interrupting the command with "^C" or by typing "^G" or the Escape
69 The key "^R" switches between the multi-substring and the regexp
70 selection mode, and "^I" between the case-sensitive and
71 case-insensitive modes.
75 \fB-h\fR, \fB--help\fR
78 \fB-m\fR, \fB--monochrome\fR
79 force the monochrome mode
81 \fB-i\fR, \fB--revert-order\fR
82 revert the order of the lines
84 \fB-b\fR, \fB--remove-bash-prefix\fR
85 remove the numeric prefix from bash history
87 \fB-z\fR, \fB--remove-zsh-prefix\fR
88 remove the time prefix from zsh history
90 \fB-d\fR, \fB--remove-duplicates\fR
91 remove duplicated lines (note that you can have two different lines
92 with the same visible part if you use the -x option)
94 \fB-e\fR, \fB--regexp\fR
97 \fB-a\fR, \fB--case-sensitive\fR
98 start in case-sensitive mode
100 \fB-j\fR, \fB--show-long-lines\fR
101 print a long-line indicator at the end of truncated lines
103 \fB-y\fR, \fB--show-hits\fR
104 highlight the part(s) of each line which match the substrings or regexp
106 \fB-u\fR, \fB--upper-case-makes-case-sensitive\fR
107 using an upper case in the matching string makes the matching
110 \fB-q\fR, \fB--no-beep\fR
111 make a flash instead of a beep when there is an edition error
114 state that all following arguments are filenames
117 standard setting for bash history search, same as
119 -b -i -d -v -w -l ${HISTSIZE}
121 \fB-t \fI<title>\fR, \fB--title \fI<title>\fR
122 add a title in the modeline
124 \fB-r \fI<pattern>\fR, \fB--pattern \fI<pattern>\fR
127 \fB-c \fI<colors>\fR, \fB--colors \fI<colors>\fR
128 select the modeline and highlight color numbers with a color list of
131 \fI<fg_modeline>,<bg_modeline>,<fg_highlight>,<bg_highlight>\fR
133 \fB-v\fR, \fB--inject-in-tty\fR
134 inject the selected line into the tty input buffer
136 \fB-w\fR, \fB--add-control-qs\fR
137 add ^Q between characters during tty injection to quote control characters
139 \fB-o \fI<filename>\fR, \fB--output-file \fI<filename>\fR
140 write the selected line into the specified file
142 \fB-s \fI<separator>\fR, \fB--pattern-separator \fI<separator>\fR
143 specify the character to separate the substrings in the search pattern
145 \fB-x \fI<separator>\fR, \fB--label-separator \fI<separator>\fR
146 specify the character to separate what to show to the user during the
147 selection from the line to return. If the provided separator is "\\n",
148 the lines to show to the user alternate with the lines to return
150 \fB-l \fI<number>\fR, \fB--number-of-lines \fI<number>\fR
151 specify the maximum number of lines to take into account
155 To use selector to search into your bash history
159 selector -q --bash <(history)
163 To show a list of directories and insert a cd command to the selected
168 selector -v -x \(dq\\n\(dq <(find . -type d | awk \(aq{print $0\(dq\\ncd \(dq$0}\(aq)
172 To select a line in a long text and returns the line number
176 selector -v -x \(dq\\n\(dq <(awk < something.txt \(aq{ print $0\(dq\\n\(dqNR }\(aq)
182 There are modeline display problems if the pattern is too long. This
183 program does not handle multibyte characters.
185 The \fB-v\fR option does not work on FreeBSD 8.0 since the TIOCSTI
186 ioctl request is broken.
190 Written by Francois Fleuret <francois@fleuret.org> and distributed
191 under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 3 as
192 published by the Free Software Foundation. This is free software: you
193 are free to change and redistribute it. There is NO WARRANTY, to the
194 extent permitted by law.