Shell program to display text files with a column ruler

shelltext;

I'm looking for a shell utility or program which will allow me to interactively view a text file as I can with the built in less command and also display a fixed ruler at the top of the screen so that I can see the exact column offset at all times for each character.

This functionality is built into some DOS utilities, such as the ancient list.com and 4Dos. Here is a screenshot from the the list command which shows what I'm looking for:

I've searched but have not been able to find any solution for this in a unix based shell. Anyone know a way to do this?

Best Answer

Conventional shells won't do this. Occasionally someone mentions a visual shell, but (a) a quick check finds none mentioning the feature and (b) those are not used a lot.

Text editors may have the feature (but that's not what you are asking for).

A terminal application such as screen or tmux would be a suitable place to add this feature (but neither does this).

For what it's worth, I do this in an application not a text editor, ded (directory editor), and find it useful for viewing files:

(the ruler can be moved up/down, interactively).

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Oooh, I found an explanation.

To quote the relevant part:

The zsh shell comes with (more than one) great feature(s), such as remote tabcompletion. If you for example want to copy a file over scp, simply hit tab at any part of the filename on the remote host. zsh is able to establish an ssh session on the background, and fetch the related information for you, so you can tabcomplete trough the remote files.

The post goes on to show some zstyle declarations that achieve the completion, but I would strongly suggest using a zsh package such as the aforementioned oh-my-zsh to get this stuff maintained by the OSS community for you.

Something seemingly relevant, as seen on my system in my .oh-my-zsh dir:

$ ack scp 
plugins/common-aliases/common-aliases.plugin.zsh
85:zstyle -e ':completion:*:(ssh|scp|sftp|rsh|rsync):hosts' hosts 'reply=(${=${${(f)"$(cat {/etc/ssh_,~/.ssh/known_}hosts(|2)(N) /dev/null)"}%%
[# ]*}//,/ })'

<...>

Shell – Run command in multiple active shells simultaneously

No need for any tools. tmux can handle this:

just open up the panes, ssh to the individual servers, and then Ctrl-B followed by

:setw synchronize-panes

and all input gets synchronized to all visible panes.
Re-type this or add "off" to the command to leave.

Best Answer

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