fzf--previewer

A simple bash script designed for use with fzf preview but maybe useful in other ways?

fzf --preview fzf--previewer

Instead of showing the usual directory error or binary file warning with the fancy bat preview in fzf this script conditionally checks the selected file and previews a tree, a highlighted text, or a hex viewer.

Prerequisites

This uses the programs:

• bat, for text file viewing
• tree, for graphical dir listings
• hexyl, for binary file viewing
• atool, for view archive file content
• pdftotext (poppler-utils), for PDF preview
• odt2txt, simple converter from OpenDocument Text
• catdoc and docx2txt, for M$-Office preview
• kitty icat or ascii-image-converter for images

On Debian/Devuan based systems you can install them like so:

sudo apt update; sudo apt install -y bat tree hexyl atool poppler-utils odt2txt catdoc kitty

Similarly, I use this with fzf (fuzzy finder), which you will need to follow the usage example.

sudo apt update; sudo apt install -y fzf

Prerequisite Troubleshooting

I noticed hexyl is sometimes problematic to install from apt, here is a workaround to install from source.

sudo apt install build-essential
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh
source $HOME/.cargo/env
cargo install hexyl

Similarly bat doesn't seem to consistently install on Ubuntu/Debian, but you can install the Rust toolchain as per the previous hexyl workaround and:

cargo install bat

Installing

I like to symlink this in ~/.local/bin as opener. So checkout the repo, then:

ln -s $HOME/opener/opener.bash $HOME/.local/bin/opener

Then you can add this alias to make fzf much more useful in file system discovery..

alias fz="find . -maxdepth 1 | sed 's/^\.\///g' | fzf --preview 'opener {}'"

Usage

With the alias, running fz will give a searchable directory listing with a preview for every filetype. You should be able to use the up and down arrow keys to navigate or just start typing and the fuzzy search will narrow down what you want to find. The preview is scrollable on some systems. Hitting [ENTER] will output the filename of the current selection. Hitting [ESCAPE] will exit the curses session.

NOTE: I've only tested this on Linux, but it might work elsewhere.