Flerp

flerp is a terminal UI for exploring and analyzing local files without leaving the command line. It opens text documents in a full-screen ratatui workspace and gives you live search, content viewing, file statistics, keyword extraction, repeated-line detection, and adjustable display settings.

It is built in Rust and currently supports plain text files, PDFs, and image metadata previews.

What Flerp Does

• Opens a file in an interactive terminal workspace
• Extracts text from PDF files for the same analysis flow used for text files
• Shows quick structural metrics such as line count, word count, unique words, empty lines, and longest line
• Finds the most frequent keywords in the loaded content
• Searches file content with live updates
• Supports case-sensitive, regex, and whole-word search modes
• Lets you jump from search results directly into the viewer
• Highlights repeated lines that appear multiple times
• Persists UI preferences in an XDG config file
• Includes multiple built-in color themes

Supported File Types

• .txt and other UTF-8 readable text files
• .pdf via text extraction
• .png, .jpg, .jpeg as metadata summaries

For image files, flerp does not render the image in the terminal. It shows file metadata such as name, format, dimensions, and file size instead.

Interface Overview

The application is organized into five modes:

1. Dashboard Quick summary cards, content preview, and the currently selected search match.
2. Search Search results, search options, and regex validation errors.
3. Viewer Scrollable file content view.
4. Analyze Extended analysis panels such as keywords and repeated lines.
5. Settings Theme and behavior settings that are saved automatically.

Features

Search

• Live search while typing
• Case-sensitive toggle
• Regex search toggle
• Whole-word matching toggle
• Match counts per result
• Jump-to-line from the selected result

Analysis

• Lines
• Words
• Characters
• Stanzas
• Empty lines
• Unique words
• Longest line
• Average word length
• Top keywords
• Repeated lines

UI and Workflow

• Full-screen terminal interface
• Multiple themes
• Optional line numbers
• Optional line wrapping
• Adjustable content preview size
• Adjustable keyword count
• Saved preferences between runs

Installation

From crates.io

cargo install flerp

From source

git clone https://github.com/Huseynteymurzade28/flerp
cd flerp
cargo install --path .

Running

Open a file

flerp path/to/file.txt

Open a PDF

flerp path/to/document.pdf

Open an image metadata view

flerp path/to/image.png

Show help

flerp --help

Show version

flerp --version

Terminal Requirement

flerp requires an interactive terminal session. It will exit with an error if stdin or stdout is not connected to a real terminal.

Keyboard Controls

Global

• q quit the application
• Esc exit search mode or quit when not searching
• Tab switch between modes
• / enter search mode

Search and Filters

• Enter apply the current search or jump to the selected result from the Search tab
• Backspace delete the last search character
• c toggle case-sensitive search
• r toggle regex mode
• w toggle whole-word matching

Viewer

• Up scroll up
• Down scroll down
• PageUp scroll up by one preview window
• PageDown scroll down by one preview window
• Home jump to the top
• End jump to the bottom

Search Results and Settings

• Up and Down move through search results
• Left and Right adjust the selected setting in the Settings tab

Display Options

• l toggle line numbers
• z toggle line wrapping

Saved Settings

Flerp stores UI preferences in the XDG config directory using directories::ProjectDirs.

Typical Linux path:

~/.config/flerp/settings.toml

Saved settings include:

• theme
• keyword limit
• preview line count
• case sensitivity
• regex mode
• whole-word mode
• line numbers
• line wrapping

Development

Prerequisites

• Rust toolchain
• Cargo

Build

cargo build --release

Test

cargo test

Run from source

cargo run -- path/to/file.txt

Tech Stack

• ratatui for the terminal UI
• crossterm for terminal input/output
• clap for CLI argument parsing
• pdf-extract for PDF text extraction
• regex for advanced searching
• serde and toml for persisted settings
• directories for config directory resolution
• image for image metadata support

Screenshots

Repository

• Homepage: https://github.com/Huseynteymurzade28/flerp
• Repository: https://github.com/Huseynteymurzade28/flerp

License

MIT