hpr2637 :: Convert it to Text
This episode will make you want to TXT all the things.
Hosted by Mr. Young on Tuesday, 2018-09-11 is flagged as Clean and is released under a CC-BY-SA license.
Unix, text, portability, ranger.
5.
The show is available on the Internet Archive at: https://archive.org/details/hpr2637
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Duration: 00:16:21
general.
Why use plain text?
- Portability
- Use with Unix tools
- Use with Ranger
Ranger for the win
- Ranger is a free console file manager that gives you greater flexibility and a good overview of your files without having to leave your *nix console. It visualizes the directory tree in two dimensions: the directory hierarchy on one, lists of files on the other, with a preview to the right so you know where you’ll be going.
- The scope functionality is where converting to text pays off. Located at
$HOME/.config/ranger/scope.sh, scope is the feature that allows for file preview from inside the console. Text files are highlighted based on their file extension, for non-text files, different converters can be used to coerce the file into a text representation. Some items are available out of the box, but the configuration is written in such a way that any text can be presented in the preview screen. - The basic format of the scope switch statement is as follows:
case "$extension" in
odt|odp)
try odt2txt "$path" && { dump | trim | fmt -s -w $width; exit 0; };;Tools in the toolset
- atool
- caca-utils
- poppler-utils
- catdoc
- catppt
- odt2txt
- ods2tsv
- docx2txt
- xlsx2csv
- mediainfo
- lynx/w3m/elinks
- highlight
Bonus tools
- q
- jq
- xmlstarlet