binocular-cli 0.2.3

Not exactly a telescope, but it's useful sometimes. TUI to search/navigate through files and workspaces.
Documentation

Not as useful as a telescope, but helps in some situations.

Table of Contents

Installation

Cargo

cargo install binocular-cli

From source

git clone https://github.com/jpcrs/Binocular.git
cd Binocular/tui
cargo build --release

The binary will be produced at ../target/release/binocular. Make sure it's on your $PATH.

Quick Start

# Default path search
binocular

# Search file names only (Path will not be considered in the search)
binocular files

# Grep file contents
binocular content

# Search directories
binocular dirs

# Search git history of a file
binocular git history src/main.rs

# List local branches
binocular git branches

# Inspect current branch commits
binocular git commits

# Tail structured logs
binocular log service.log
kubectl logs -f deployment/app | binocular log

# Diff two files
binocular diff old.rs new.rs

Commands

Command Description
binocular Default path search.
binocular path [QUERY] Search full paths.
binocular files [QUERY] Search file names only.
binocular content [QUERY] Search file contents (alias: grep).
binocular dirs [QUERY] Search directories only.
binocular git history <FILE> [QUERY] Search committed line history for a tracked file.
binocular git branches [QUERY] Search local branches.
binocular git commits [QUERY] Search commits on the current branch (alias: git logs).
binocular log [FILE...] Open the structured log viewer from stdin or tail log files directly.
binocular diff <LEFT> <RIGHT> Open a direct diff preview for two files.

Global Options

  • -H, --headless — Skip the TUI and print results directly.
  • --output-format <plain|jsonl> — Format for interactive selection output.
  • --preview <command> — Use a custom preview command.
  • --delimiter <string> — Delimiter for preview placeholders (default: :).
  • --split <string> — Split stdin lines into multiple items.
  • -e, --exact — Switch from fuzzy to contiguous token matching.
  • -l, --location <DIR> — Add search roots.
  • --no-hidden, --no-git-ignore, --no-ignore — Adjust filesystem filtering.

Features

Rich Previews

The preview pane handles a wide variety of file types out of the box:

  • Source code — Tree-sitter syntax highlighting for Rust, Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, Go, C/C++, C#, JSON, TOML, YAML, HTML, and CSS...
  • Images — JPEG, PNG, GIF, WebP, BMP, TIFF, ICO rendered inline in the terminal.
  • Archives — ZIP, TAR (with deflate, bzip2, zstd) file listings.
  • PDFs — Text extraction for content search and preview.
  • SQLite — Schema and row preview for .db and .sqlite files.
  • Media — Audio/video metadata (ID3, FLAC, Spotlight on macOS) with embedded artwork.
  • Binary — Hex dump, entropy analysis, and printable string extraction.
  • Structured logs — JSONL and logfmt parsing with live tail support.

Vim Navigation

The search box and the preview pane supports vim movements.

Custom Preview Commands

binocular --preview "bat --style=plain --line-range={1}: {0}" content

Configuration

Binocular writes a default config on first launch:

Platform Path
macOS / Linux (XDG) $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/binocular/config.toml
macOS (fallback) ~/.config/binocular/config.toml
Windows %APPDATA%\binocular\config.toml

The bundled template lives at tui/config/default.toml.

Current config covers:

  • Keybindings — Some keybindings
  • Log viewer — log.max_entries and related settings.
  • Layout — Persisted pane splits saved to layout.toml beside the config.

Headless Mode

Use --headless (or -H) to bypass the TUI and stream results directly:


# Split each line into multiple items
printf 'a,b,c\n' | binocular --headless --split ','

Output Formats

Interactive mode prints selections to stdout after the TUI exits:

Source Plain Output JSONL (--output-format jsonl)
Path absolute path {"kind":"path","path":"..."}
Content abs_path:line[:column] {"kind":"grep","path":"...","line":1}
Git History commit:path:line {"kind":"git_history","commit":"..."}
Stdin raw line {"kind":"stdin","text":"..."}
Branch branch name {"kind":"git_branch","name":"..."}
Commit commit hash {"kind":"git_commit","hash":"..."}

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