SNUX - SNippets in tmUX (WIP)

THIS IS A WORK IN PROGRESS. MIGHT NOT EVEN WORK

Table of Contents

• SNUX - SNippets in tmUX (WIP)
• Setup
• Snippet format
• JSON Schema
• Neovim completion
• Filter by category
• General
• Actions
  • sleep
  • execute
  • send-to-pane
  • ask
  • select-from-list

Displays a list of (code) snippets in a TMUX popup and sends the selection to a (new) pane.

Additional features include:

• asking for a variable to be used
• make a selection from a list of variables
• more to come?

If you're not already running in a tmux session by default, I strongly suggest you do so. You can modify your tmux configuration such that you don't even notice it's there until you start splitting panes and create new windows and sessions. Personally I have the status bar and pane-border-status disabled by default to have as little clutter as possible.

My preference is to have C-f the leader key for tmux (instead of C-b) and have C-f C-u popup this snippet-tool.

Upon launching, this tool loads snippets from one or more files and presents a list of all the titles.
It then uses the (awesome!) fzf tool to allow fuzzy find what you type.

The main reason I wrote this little tool is to have a place where I can store all those long one-liners that I often use, or to store longer commands that I may not always remember correctly.

For example, to get a list of top users on CloudLinux I would use this long command:

cloudlinux-statistics --period 1d --json --limit 10 --show cpu,io,iops --order-by cpu | jq -r '(.users[] | [.username, .domain, .usage.cpu.lve, .usage.io.lve, .usage.iops.lve, .limits.cpu.lve, .limits.io.lve, .limits.iops.lve, .faults.cpu.lve, .faults.io.lve, .faults.iops.lve] | @csv)' | column -t -s, --table-columns 'user,domain,cpu,io,iops,limits_cpu,limits_io,limits_iops,faults_cpu,faults_io,faults_iops'

Not that difficult. But getting jq to present a nice tabular output is a bit tedious and recreating this one-liner from scratch will take a few minutes.

Once I have a nice one-liner that I may want to use again, I don't want to have to rely on my bash history.

Launching my snux tool, fuzzy finding the desired command and sending it to a pane now takes me about 2 seconds.

> clou  < 6/13 ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  cloudlinux: LVE: top 10 users
  cloudlinux: show top usage accounts (IO)
  cloudlinux: show top usage accounts (CPU)
  cloudlinux: show usage for given accounts (24h)
  cloudlinux: overall platform top CPU users
▌ cloudlinux: show top usage accounts

╭─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╮
│ show top usage accounts                                             │
╰─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╯

For me this is most useful in cases where I often grep | awk | grep | sed | tail | grep | awk et cetera.

This is not retricted to only one-liners. A snippet in this case can consist of multiple lines of code to send to a pane and also ask for strings that should be put in the code before sending it to a tmux pane.

This small tool is meant to simplify executing longer one-liners. The interesting stuff is whatever is stored as snippets. Instead of keeping a document somewhere with longer lines of code (or gists if you will) and copying and pasting them; this tool allows you to quickly search for, and send a one-liner to your shell.

Perhaps this inspires others to compile handy 'snippet' files to share publicly.

Setup

Create a key-binding in TMUX to launch the Python script in a pop-up. Set a desired location and width and height according to preference.

bind C-u display-popup -h 50% -y 30% -w 80% -E "$HOME/snux/snux.py"

Snippet format

The code reads snippets from multiple files in a given folder. This allows you to, for example maintain categories (each a single file)

By default all snippets are loaded and displayed but a later version may allow filtering of categories.

Each snippet file follows the following json format:

{
    "schema": "file://$HOME/snux/snux-schema.json",
    "snippets": [
    {
      "title": "List contents of current directory",
      "description": "see title [unused for now]",
      "tags": ["list","directory","ls"],
      "commands": [
        {
          "action": "send-to-pane",
          "code": "ls -lahg",
          "enter": true
        }
      ]
    },
  ]
}

A snippet can have one or more actions. They will get executed in the order in which they are defined.

JSON Schema

The included JSON schema file is likely outdated and at this moment its uncertain if this will be maintaned and follow proper structure.

Neovim completion

For faster creation of new code snippets see completion (WIP - Nothing there yet)

Filter by category

Presuming the snippet-files are category based:

If the script is called with --per-file it will present a list of all the snippet files and then display only the snippets within the chosen file.

Every snippet can have a string containing tags. These tags will be shown if the script is called normally by adding them before each title and put them in [] brackets

General

Any title should be unique. Snux does string matching to find the snippet which has been selected.

Actions

The following actions are supported:

sleep

Sleep for x seconds

{
    "title": "Sleep for 5 seconds",
    "description": "not implemented",
    "commands": [{
        "action": "sleep",
        "seconds": 5
    }]
}

execute

Executes code in the TMUX popup

this does not open a new pane. It executes the given code or command in the active TMUX popup

A use case might be to execute something which gets used in a follow up action within the same snippet command

{
    "title": "Execute something in this popupactive pane",
    "description": "Do something in this Tmux popup",
    "commands": [{
        "action": "execute",
        "code": "<something>"
    }]
}

send-to-pane

send-to-pane sends the given code as keys to the active pane. Use "enter": true to send a Return or "enter": false to leave the send line as is so it can be reviewed before being executed.

{
    "title": "Send something to active pane",
    "description": "not implemented",
    "commands": [{
        "action": "send-to-pane",
        "code": "ls -lagh",
        "enter": true
    }]
}

Variables can be used in the code string by using %{variable_name}. For example:

{
    "title": "Send something to active pane",
    "description": "not implemented",
    "commands": [{
        "action": "send-to-pane",
        "code": "ls -lagh %{path}"
        "enter": true
    }]
}

The variable needs to have been defined in a previous command in the same snippet

ask

A simple prompt which stores the answer in a variable.

{
    "title": "list contents of given folder",
    "description": "not implemented",
    "commands": [
        {
            "action": "ask",
            "prompt": "which directory? : ",
            "variable_name": "directory"
        },
        {
            "action": "send-to-pane",
            "code": "ls -lagh %{directory}",
            "enter": true
        }
    ]
}

select-from-list

{
    "title": "list contents of given folder",
    "description": "not implemented",
    "commands": [
        {
            "action": "select-from-list",
            "variable_name": "period",
            "list": ["1h","2h","4h","1d"]
        },
        {
            "action": "send-to-pane",
            "code": "ls -lagh %{directory}",
            "enter": true
        }
    ]
}