ffcat

Output file preview directly in terminal. Currently can only output via iTerm2 control codes.

WARNING: This is a quick proof of concept hack

Supports

• Video by showing frames
• Audio by showing wave form
• Images
• SVG
• Graphviz

Requirements

Make sure you have a reasonably modern ffmpeg, inkscape, rsvg and graphviz in $PATH.

Install

# build and install latest master
go install github.com/wader/ffcat@master
# copy binary to $PATH if needed
cp "$(go env GOPATH)/bin/ffcat" /usr/local/bin

Tricks

Use with watchexec etc

watchexec -- "... | ffcat -c"

-c makes iTerm2 clear the buffer to not run out of memory, same as echo -e '\x1b]1337;ClearScrollback\x07'.

Plot using gnuplot

# format is whitespace separated x y values
echo -e "1 3\n2 4\ne\n" | gnuplot -e "set terminal png; plot '-' using 1:2 w l" | ffcat

Show PDF page

pdftocairo -f 1 file.pdf -png -singlefile - | ffcat

Show go mod depedency graph

go mod graph | (echo 'digraph {'; sed 's/\(.*\) \(.*\)/"\1" -> "\2"/'; echo '}') | ffcat

TODO and ideas

• Ok to use stderr to talk to iterm2? seem to work, makes it possible to pipe
• iterm2 clean buffer argument?
• Rename? is not really concatinating
• Combine wave form and spectragram?
• Silent/verbose output
• Pipe input, have to buffer?
• Timeline grid
• Seek from end support. -20: etc?
• Stats, loudness etc?
• Proper seek and frame select
• Select frames syntax?
• Render subtitles?
• Sixel output
• ANSI output
• PNG output if not a terminal