Watchbind

Table of Contents

• Features
• Install
• Customizations
• Tips

Features

• Customizable: all keybindings and styles (colors and boldness) are customizable
• Flexible: specify settings using cli options, a toml config file or both
• Speed: written completely in rust with minimal dependencies

Install

Build from source

git clone https://github.com/fritzrehde/watchbind.git
cd watchbind
cargo build

From crates.io

cargo install watchbind

AUR

To be added.

Customizations

There are several ways to customize the settings:

1. The command line options override all other settings (i.e. all toml and default settings).
2. A toml config file, specified with watchbind --config-file <FILE>, overrides all default settings (Example: test-config.toml).

Keybindings

On the command line, specify keybindings with the option watchbind --bind KEY:CMD[,KEY:CMD]*.

In a toml config file, specify keybindings like so:

[keybindings]
"KEY" = "CMD"
"KEY" = "CMD"

esc
enter
left
right
up
down
home
end
pageup
pagedown
backtab
backspace
del
delete
insert
ins
f1
f2
f3
f4
f5
f6
f7
f8
f9
f10
f11
f12
space
tab
[any single character]

exit
reload
unselect
next
previous
first
last
COMMAND     # blocks watchbind until finished executing
COMMAND &   # executed as background process

COMMAND will be executed in a subshell that has the environment variable LINE set to the currently selected line.

Style

Foreground colors, background colors and boldness of the selected line and all unselected lines can be customized.

white
black
red
green
yellow
blue
magenta
cyan
gray
dark_gray
light_red
light_green
light_yellow
light_blue
light_magenta
light_cyan

Tips

Piping

If you want to use pipes in your command on the command line, make sure to escape the pipe symbol like so:

watchbind ls \| grep "test"

or put quotes around the command

watchbind "ls | grep test"

Otherwise, the shell will think you want to pipe the output of watchbind ls to grep test.

Subshell

The commands you bind to keys will be executed in a subshell using sh -c.

This means you can run a command like

watchbind --bind "enter:notify-send \$LINE" ls

and the environment variable $LINE will contain the selected line.

But note that

watchbind --bind "enter:notify-send $LINE" ls

will not work as expected, because $LINE will be replaced in the shell you are running the watchbind command from.