📺 television

A blazingly fast general purpose fuzzy finder for your terminal written in Rust.

The revolution will (not) be televised.

About

Television is a blazingly fast general purpose fuzzy finder TUI written in Rust.

It is inspired by the neovim telescope plugin and is designed to be fast, efficient, simple to use and easily extensible. It is built on top of tokio, ratatui and the nucleo matcher used by the helix editor.

Installation

With cargo:

cargo install television

From the latest release page

• Download the latest release asset for your platform (e.g. tv-vX.X.X-linux-x86_64.tar.gz if you're on a linux x86 machine)
• Unpack and copy to the relevant location for your system (e.g. /usr/local/bin on macos and linux)

Usage

tv [channel] #[default: files] [possible values: env, files, git-repos, text, alias]

By default, television will launch with the files channel on.

tv's files channel running on the curl codebase

Matcher behavior

television uses a fuzzy matching algorithm to filter the list of entries. The algorithm that is used depends on the input pattern that you provide.

Matcher	Pattern
Fuzzy	foo
Substring	'foo / !foo to negate
Prefix	^foo / !^foo to negate
Suffix	foo$ / !foo$ to negate
Exact	^foo$ / !^foo$ to negate

For more information on the matcher behavior, see the nucleo-matcher documentation.

Keybindings

Default keybindings are as follows:

Key	Description
↑ / ↓ or Ctrl + n / p	Navigate through the list of entries
Ctrl + u / d	Scroll the preview pane up / down
Enter	Select the current entry
Ctrl + y	Copy the selected entry to the clipboard
Ctrl + r	Toggle remote control mode
Ctrl + s	Toggle send to channel mode
Esc	Quit the application

These keybindings can be customized in the configuration file (see Customization).

Built-in Channels

The following channels are currently available:

• Files: search through files in a directory tree.
• Text: search through textual content in a directory tree.
• GitRepos: search through git repositories anywhere on the file system.
• Env: search through environment variables and their values.
• Alias: search through shell aliases and their values.
• Stdin: search through lines of text from stdin.

Design (high-level)

Channels

Television's design is primarily based on the concept of Channels. Channels are just structs that implement the OnAir trait.

As such, channels can virtually be anything that can respond to a user query and return a result under the form of a list of entries. This means channels can be anything from conventional data sources you might want to search through (like files, git repositories, remote filesystems, environment variables etc.) to more exotic implementations that might inclue a REPL, a calculator, a web browser, search through your spotify library, your email, etc.

Television provides a set of built-in Channels that can be used out of the box (see Built-in Channels). The list of available channels will grow over time as new channels are implemented to satisfy different use cases.

Transitions

When it makes sense, Television allows for transitions between different channels. For example, you might want to start searching through git repositories, then refine your search to a specific set of files in that shortlist of repositories and then finally search through the textual content of those files.

This can easily be achieved using transitions.

Previewers

Entries returned by different channels can be previewed in a separate pane. This is useful when you want to see the contents of a file, the value of an environment variable, etc. Because entries returned by different channels may represent different types of data, Television allows for channels to declare the type of previewer that should be used. Television comes with a set of built-in previewers that can be used out of the box and will grow over time.

Recipes

Here are some examples of how you can use television to make your life easier, more productive and fun. You may want to add some of these examples as aliases to your shell configuration file so that you can easily access them.

NOTE: most of the following examples are meant for macOS. Most of the commands should work on Linux as well, but you may need to adjust them slightly.

CDing into git repo

cd `tv git-repos`

Opening file in default editor

open `tv`

VSCode:

code --goto `tv`

Vim

vim `tv`

at a specific line using the text channel

tv text | xargs -oI {} sh -c 'vim "$(echo {} | cut -d ":" -f 1)" +$(echo {} | cut -d ":" -f 2)'

Inspecting the current directory

ls -1a | tv

Terminal Emulators Compatibility

Here is a list of terminal emulators that have currently been tested with television and their compatibility status.

Terminal Emulator	Compatibility
Alacritty	✅
Kitty	✅
iTerm2	✅
Wezterm	✅
macOS Terminal	functional but coloring issues

Customization

You may wish to customize the behavior of television by providing your own configuration file. The configuration file is a simple TOML file that allows you to customize the behavior of television in a number of ways.

Platform	Value
Linux	$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/television/config.toml or $HOME/.config/television/config.toml
macOS	$HOME/Library/Application Support/television/config.toml
Windows	{FOLDERID_LocalAppData}\television\config

Any of these paths may be overriden by setting the TELEVISION_CONFIG environment variable to the path of your desired configuration folder.

Default Configuration

The default configuration file can be found in ./.config/config.toml.

Television's default `config.toml`

# Ui settings
# ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
[ui]
# Whether to use nerd font icons in the UI
# This option requires a font patched with Nerd Font in order to properly
# display glyphs (see https://www.nerdfonts.com/ for more information)
use_nerd_font_icons = false
# How much space to allocate for the UI (in percentage of the screen)
# ┌───────────────────────────────────────┐
# │                                       │
# │            Terminal screen            │
# │    ┌─────────────────────────────┐    │
# │    │                             │    │
# │    │                             │    │
# │    │                             │    │
# │    │       Television UI         │    │
# │    │                             │    │
# │    │                             │    │
# │    │                             │    │
# │    │                             │    │
# │    └─────────────────────────────┘    │
# │                                       │
# │                                       │
# └───────────────────────────────────────┘
ui_scale = 80

# Previewers settings
# ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
[previewers.file]
# The theme to use for syntax highlighting
# A list of available themes can be found in the https://github.com/sharkdp/bat
# repository which uses the same syntax highlighting engine as television
theme = "Visual Studio Dark+"

# Keybindings
# ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
# Channel mode keybindings
[keybindings.Channel]
# Quit the application
esc = "Quit"
# Scrolling through entries
down = "SelectNextEntry"
ctrl-n = "SelectNextEntry"
up = "SelectPrevEntry"
ctrl-p = "SelectPrevEntry"
# Scrolling the preview pane
ctrl-d = "ScrollPreviewHalfPageDown"
ctrl-u = "ScrollPreviewHalfPageUp"
# Select an entry
enter = "SelectEntry"
# Copy the selected entry to the clipboard
ctrl-y = "CopyEntryToClipboard"
# Toggle the remote control mode
ctrl-r = "ToggleRemoteControl"
# Toggle the send to channel mode
ctrl-s = "ToggleSendToChannel"

# Remote control mode keybindings
[keybindings.RemoteControl]
# Quit the application
esc = "Quit"
# Scrolling through entries
down = "SelectNextEntry"
up = "SelectPrevEntry"
ctrl-n = "SelectNextEntry"
ctrl-p = "SelectPrevEntry"
# Select an entry
enter = "SelectEntry"
# Toggle the remote control mode
ctrl-r = "ToggleRemoteControl"

# Send to channel mode keybindings
[keybindings.SendToChannel]
# Quit the application
esc = "Quit"
# Scrolling through entries
down = "SelectNextEntry"
up = "SelectPrevEntry"
ctrl-n = "SelectNextEntry"
ctrl-p = "SelectPrevEntry"
# Select an entry
enter = "SelectEntry"
# Toggle the send to channel mode
ctrl-s = "ToggleSendToChannel"

Contributions

Contributions, issues and pull requests are welcome.

See CONTRIBUTING.md for more information.