Pipec

Pipec is a terminal application designed to edit command pipelines.

Purpose

I often need to execute complex pipelines: query some API, extract information using jq, execute some commands based on it:

curl -s https://some.api/fetch?limit=100 | jq -r '.result.items[] | .host.fqdn' | xargs -n1 -I% -- ssh '%' grep ERROR /var/log/service.log

Editing such pipelines directly in shell has some inconveniences:

• It is hard to navigate between commands when command line becomes too long;
• Each stage of pipeline is executed every time, even when it isn't changed. This is especially sad when some stage takes a long time to run;
• It is hard to preview output of any internal stage.

Screenshot

Demo

Features

• Minimalistic user interface
• Output of stages is cached and reused on next runs. Don't wait for long API response or database query every time.
• Preview output of any stage in pipeline.
• Possible shell integration: press key to edit existing pipeline, get updated one on exit.
• Command syntax highlighting

Guide

Installation

From source

cargo install --locked pipec

MacOS

brew tap kriomant/tap
brew install pipec

Linux

Install binary from GitHub Releases

Basics

Just running pipec will open empty pipeline.

Basic help with hotkeys and legend is shown on start, so there shouldn't be any problem to start using pipec.

Type command and press Enter to execute. Use Ctrl-Q to exit. You will be asked whether you want to print resulting pipeline or it's output.

You can also copy various items to clipboard with Ctrl-Y.

Warning: All output of each stage is saved into memory. Don't use it with commands which produces a lot of output.

Focused and shown stages

Stage you are editing is focused one. You may change focused stage with ↑/↓ keys. By default commands are executed up to focused one.

However, it is often convenient to preview output of some earlier or later stage when composing current one. So there is concept of shown stage. You select stage to show using Ctrl-Space key.

Starting with existing pipeline

Pipec accepts any number of positional arguments. Each argument is turned into separate stage command:

pipec 'ls -l' 'grep .toml'

If you don't want to split pipeline into commands manually, use may use --parse-commands option to split passed pipelines into commands:

pipec --parse-commands 'ls -l | grep .toml'

Shell integration

Most convenient way to use pipec is to integrate it with shell.

zsh

You may put following to you ~/.zshrc to edit currently typed command with pipec by pressing Ctrl-X P:

edit-pipeline-widget() {
  local OUTPUT=$(cd ~/path/to/pipec; cargo run -- --parse-commands --print-on-exit=pipeline -- "$BUFFER")
  if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
    BUFFER="$OUTPUT"
  fi
}
zle -N edit-pipeline-widget
bindkey '^xp' edit-pipeline-widget

If you know how to implement that for other shells beside zsh, tell me.