pet; tuc; nip

Today, we cover three (well, four, really) tools/services that are each 3-letters in length, do one thing, and do it bonkers well.

TL;DR

(This is an AI-generated summary of today’s Drop.)

• pet: A command-line snippet manager written in Golang, designed to simplify the management and retrieval of command-line snippets. It enhances productivity by allowing users to save, manage, and share command-line snippets across systems via GitHub Gists or GitLab Snippets. The tool adds context to commands and offers control over their lookup and presentation, aiming to provide sanity on the CLI for frequently used commands. More details can be found on its GitHub page.
• tuc: A modern replacement for the cut CLI command, written in Rust, featuring support for regular expressions and the ability to transform output streams into different formats like JSON. It simplifies extracting specific data from files, such as the leaf nodes from a CSV file, with enhanced functionality over cut. For more information and to try it out, visit tuc’s GitHub page and its online playground.
• nip.io: A service that maps any IP address to a hostname, facilitating the use of non-public routable IP addresses in development environments where a hostname is required. It supports various formats, with or without a name, and is particularly useful for apps, frameworks, or servers that require a fully-qualified domain name instead of an IP address. For additional features, including IPv6 support and TLS, the related service sslip.io is recommended.

pet

If you’re even remotely like me (in the following aspect), you likely execute repetitive commands or scripts on a fairly regular basis. This can be prone to error, but taking the time to compartmentalize and document these idioms can be hard to mentally justify. With pet — a pretty simple command-line snippet manager — we can help make this chore a bit less painful, and also get a productivity boost while we’re at it.

This 3-letter Golang CLI tool operates on a fairly straightforward premise: it lets us save, manage, and retrieve command-line snippets without leaving the terminal. This lets us focus more on their core tasks, with the added ability to share these snippets across systems via GitHub Gists or GitLab Snippets.

What makes this tool slightly more useful than, say, any of the leveled-up Bash/Zsh enhanced history looker-uppers, is that you get to add context to the commands, and have some decent control over how the command are looked up and presented.

This will not replace any code snippet managers you have, but it may give you some additional sanity on the CLI, especially for commands you do not use frequently, but do use more than once.

The README does a ton of heavy lifting, so I’ll leave you in their capable hands.

tuc

I have always had a hate-hate relationship with the cut CLI command. My disdain for it and frustration at trying to get it to do something is likely why I became somewhat of an awk expert (back in the day).

What if I told you there was a modern replacement for it that is written in Rust, has some fancy features — including support for regular expressions — and, can even transmogrify the output stream into other formats like JSON?

Oh, I have your interest, now?

Well, tuc is said modern replacement and it is bonkers cool. Let’s say we want all the leaf nodes from the seminal D3 flare CSV example data file. For those that do not know what that “flare” is, it’s just a way to represent a hierarchy of nodes. This is a snippet from the file:

id,value
flare,
flare.analytics,
flare.analytics.cluster,
flare.analytics.cluster.AgglomerativeCluster,3938
flare.analytics.cluster.CommunityStructure,3812
flare.analytics.cluster.HierarchicalCluster,6714
flare.analytics.cluster.MergeEdge,743
flare.analytics.graph,
flare.analytics.graph.BetweennessCentrality,3534
flare.analytics.graph.LinkDistance,5731
flare.analytics.graph.MaxFlowMinCut,7840
flare.analytics.graph.ShortestPaths,5914
flare.analytics.graph.SpanningTree,3416
flare.analytics.optimization,
flare.analytics.optimization.AspectRatioBanker,7074
flare.animate,
flare.animate.Easing,17010
flare.animate.FunctionSequence,5842
flare.animate.interpolate,
flare.animate.interpolate.ArrayInterpolator,1983
flare.animate.interpolate.ColorInterpolator,2047
flare.animate.interpolate.DateInterpolator,1375
flare.animate.interpolate.Interpolator,8746
flare.animate.interpolate.MatrixInterpolator,2202
flare.animate.interpolate.NumberInterpolator,1382
flare.animate.interpolate.ObjectInterpolator,1629
flare.animate.interpolate.PointInterpolator,1675
flare.animate.interpolate.RectangleInterpolator,2042
flare.animate.ISchedulable,1041
flare.animate.Parallel,5176
flare.animate.Pause,449
flare.animate.Scheduler,5593
flare.animate.Sequence,5534
flare.animate.Transition,9201
flare.animate.Transitioner,19975
flare.animate.TransitionEvent,1116
flare.animate.Tween,6006

With tuc, this is super easy:

$ tuc -e "[\.,]" -f '-2' < flare.csv | tail -n +2
flare
analytics
cluster
AgglomerativeCluster
CommunityStructure
HierarchicalCluster
MergeEdge
graph
BetweennessCentrality
LinkDistance
MaxFlowMinCut
ShortestPaths
SpanningTree
optimization
AspectRatioBanker
animate
Easing
FunctionSequence
interpolate
ArrayInterpolator
ColorInterpolator
DateInterpolator
Interpolator
MatrixInterpolator
NumberInterpolator
ObjectInterpolator
PointInterpolator
RectangleInterpolator
ISchedulable
Parallel
Pause
Scheduler
Sequence
Transition
Transitioner
TransitionEvent
Tween

That -e means “use a regular expression” which gives tuc bionic powers compared to the sad, sad cut. Note, too, that we can use negative offsets, so we do not need to know how many chunks things will be separated into.

Now, lets say we do want the last value included and output everything as JSON:

$ tuc -e "[\.,]" -f '-2,-1' --json < flare.csv | tail -n +2
["flare",""]
["analytics",""]
["cluster",""]
["AgglomerativeCluster","3938"]
["CommunityStructure","3812"]
["HierarchicalCluster","6714"]
["MergeEdge","743"]
["graph",""]
["BetweennessCentrality","3534"]
["LinkDistance","5731"]
["MaxFlowMinCut","7840"]
["ShortestPaths","5914"]
["SpanningTree","3416"]
["optimization",""]
["AspectRatioBanker","7074"]
["animate",""]
["Easing","17010"]
["FunctionSequence","5842"]
["interpolate",""]
["ArrayInterpolator","1983"]
["ColorInterpolator","2047"]
["DateInterpolator","1375"]
["Interpolator","8746"]
["MatrixInterpolator","2202"]
["NumberInterpolator","1382"]
["ObjectInterpolator","1629"]
["PointInterpolator","1675"]
["RectangleInterpolator","2042"]
["ISchedulable","1041"]
["Parallel","5176"]
["Pause","449"]
["Scheduler","5593"]
["Sequence","5534"]
["Transition","9201"]
["Transitioner","19975"]
["TransitionEvent","1116"]
["Tween","6006"]

It has a few more bells and whistles, but if you’re still not convinced to give it a spot on your SSD, check out their online playground, and I think you’ll be a convert.

nip

OK, so this is technically five letters and a period, but Gimli would say it only counts as three, so that’s good enough for me.

We’ve talked about devd before (it’s a Golang on-the-fly web server++), and it has a companion domain named devd.io which resolves to 127.0.0.1, and exists because many apps/frameworks/servers reequire a fully-qualified domain name vs. an IP address to work.

What if you have non-public routable IP addresses that you want to use in your development environment, but have similar “must be a hostname” requirement?

Enter nip.io. (I’m shamelessly stealing the following copy from the site).

It llows you to do that by mapping any IP Address to a hostname using the following formats:

Without a name:

• 10.0.0.1.nip.io maps to 10.0.0.1
• 192-168-1-250.nip.io maps to 192.168.1.250
• 0a000803.nip.io maps to 10.0.8.3

With a name:

• app.10.8.0.1.nip.io maps to 10.8.0.1
• app-116-203-255-68.nip.io maps to 116.203.255.68
• app-c0a801fc.nip.io maps to 192.168.1.252
• customer1.app.10.0.0.1.nip.io maps to 10.0.0.1
• customer2-app-127-0-0-1.nip.io maps to 127.0.0.1
• customer3-app-7f000101.nip.io maps to 127.0.1.1

It can do more, but they deserve your 👀, so give it a tap.

If you also need IPv6 support and TLS, hit up sslip.io. You will not be disappointed.

FIN

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