markline: markable line picker from stdin to stdout

Example:

printf "%s\n%s\n%s\n" alpha bravo charlie > example.txt
cat example.txt | markline

You should see each line with a a bullet character that you can edit, and the line text:

• alpha
• bravo
• charlie

Move up and down in the list by typing arrow keys.

Mark any line by typing any alphanumeric character. The character will replace the bullet.

Mark as many lines as you want, such as:

1 alpha
2 bravo
3 charlie

When you're done, type ENTER or ESC to finish.

The command outputs each line:

• the line's mark character

• a separator space

• the line's original text

Example

Suppose you have a text file that is a list of tasks, one per line, and you want to mark each line with "x" meaning done, or "o" meaning "todo".

Then you can pipe the results to any other command, such as a filter, that you can use to show just the tasks that are done.

Run:

cat example.txt | markline | grep '^x'

Mark each line with "x" or "o" such as:

x alpha
o bravo
x charlie

Type ENTER or ESC to finish.

Output:

x alpha
x charlie

Install

Install markline as a typical Rust crate:

cargo install markline

If people want other ways, such as with package managers, we welcome help to create these ways.

Purpose

The purpose of this command is a simple marker, that is easy to use, and that work wells in on the command line such as within a pipe.

The purpose isn't intended to handle very long lines, or very long inputs.

Projects with similarities

checkline that's the same kind of tool plus checkboxes: https://github.com/sixarm/checkline

vipe that can pipe in and out of $EDITOR: https://github.com/juliangruber/vipe

peco simplistic interactive filtering tool: https://github.com/peco/peco

percol adds interactive selection to the traditional pipe concept. https://github.com/mooz/percol

canything interactive grep tools: https://github.com/keiji0/canything

zaw zsh-friendly interactive grep tool: https://github.com/zsh-users/zaw

fzf interactive grep tool written in Go language. https://github.com/junegunn/fzf

Settings

On some systems, you may need to set your localization environment variables.

Example:

export LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
export LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
export LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
export LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
export LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
export LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
export LC_ALL="en_US.UTF-8"

Feedback

We welcome constructive criticism and ideas for improvements.

Tracking

• Program: markline
• Version: 1.1.3
• License: MIT OR BSD OR GPL-2.0 OR GPL-3.0
• Created: 2022-10-15T12:24:50Z
• Updated: 2024-06-07T17:43:21Z
• Website: https://github.com/sixarm/markline
• Contact: Joel Parker Henderson ([email protected])