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Life & fun · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to LineSelect, shell utility to interactively select lines in a pipeline

Allows you to "pause" a shell pipeline to interactively select a subset of lines to proceed with. I've always wanted a tool like this, as it effectively combines the best of shell pipes (easy to automate) and visual file managers (easy to make selections). Now that I have it I can't believe a tool like this is not already part of the standard set of shell utilities. There are so many situations where it is useful. Tested on Linux but should also work on MacOS. Also: please help me come up with a better name!

LineSelect is a shell utility that pauses a pipeline to let users interactively select which lines to pass forward. It combines the automation benefits of piped commands with the intuitive selection interface of visual… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. LineSelect, shell utility to interactively select lines in a pipeline launched in 2023; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

  1. 1

    Command line picker to pipe through. Contribute to bernardorufino/pick development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2015 · github.com · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    A human-friendly and fast alternative to cut (and sometimes awk) - theryangeary/choose

    2020 · github.com · its alternatives →

  3. 3
    Snip▲220

    A simple single line code/commands manager

    2019 · snip.netlify.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    Hi HN! I've created a CLI tool called "ell" that allows you to interact with LLMs directly from your terminal. Designed with the Unix philosophy in mind, ell is simple, modular, and extensible. You can easily pipe input and output to integrate with other tools. Its templates and hook-based plugins enable you to customize and extend its functionality to suit any needs. Check out the README for usage instructions and examples. I developed this tool because existing solutions often felt too heavy, with many dependencies, or they weren't friendly to piping and customization. I, on the contrary,…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    Announcing `tuc`, a utility similar to coreutils `cut`, but more powerful. It allows to split text or bytes into parts and reassemble them in any order. I always found `cut` very practical for some tasks where `sed` or `awk` were overkill or awkward to use, but I also felt the need for more features. Some key differences from `cut`: - parts can be referenced by negative indexes - delimiters can be any number of characters long, or match a regex - can split text into lines, and reassemble them

    2022 · github.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    pypipe is a command-line tool for writing data pipelines in Python. When working with data processing in the terminal, I often find myself wanting to pass the output of commands to Python for further processing. In such cases, one can either write one-liners or create regular Python scripts and connect them through pipes. However, using pypipe makes this process more convenient and efficient.

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    Run a shell script with bash, line-by-line, prompted on each command. Useful for running unknown scripts or debugging. Not a secure substitute for understanding a script beforehand. - LICENSE

    2021 · gist.github.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    A sharp cut(1) clone. Contribute to sstadick/hck development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2021 · github.com · its alternatives →

  9. 9AP

    After having cycled through various CLI-based todo apps, I started to realise that I actually don’t need a tool at all for managing my todos. Most of the time, my use cases are quite simple, like viewing my todo items, checking them off, or adding a new one. Rather than having to memorise CLI commands for these interactions (which I’m not super good at), I figured that it’s easier for me to use my text editor directly, and have an editor plugin help me with the visual structure and some convenience functionality. So, kind-of similar to Emacs Org Mode, but without having to use Emacs. I…

    2022 · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    I often find myself in situations where I need to extract some data from a website, either as one time thing or periodically (and then watch for changes). Maybe I'm tracking stocks, or a delivery, or I want to know when tickets become available to the local sauna; maybe a friend called and asked "can you get me all data from that website into a spreadsheet?" (this happens surprisingly often) I used to write one-off scripts for that, often with Python or JavaScript, but I noticed I spend about one minute getting the right CSS selectors, and then another 10 minutes setting the rest of the…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    Get and manipulate data with a visual programming interface.

    2017 · pipes.digital · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    A command-line tool to turn web pages into readable PDF, EPUB, HTML, or Markdown docs. - danburzo/percollate

    2018 · github.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    Daily notes command line tool. Contribute to tomlockwood/dn development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2019 · github.com · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    A hackable, minimal, fast TUI file explorer. Contribute to sayanarijit/xplr development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2021 · github.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    node-based editor for exploring, analyzing and transforming data without code

    2021 · datablocks.pro · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    My Downloads folder had been left unkept for a really long time and cleaning it up using Finder was quite cumbersome. So I started creating a simple app to help me filter out and delete or move the files in the folder. It started out very basic and the filtering options genuinely helped me clean out the Downloads folder, then as I thought of more features I would like to see in a file manager I started to add them. Some of the features are: - Fuzzy go to folder/file where you only need to write a few letters of a full path, get suggestions and can jump to the correct path instantly -…

    Jul 2026 · whimfiles.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    Hey HN, I built this over the last year as I always wanted to have an easy file and terminal access to all of my servers, including containers and clusters that you normally can't connect to with existing solutions out of the box. At first glance it might not look very novel, but if you dig a little deeper, you will see that the entire foundation of how it communicates with remote systems is completely different from any other solution out there. What happens in the background can essentially be explained this way: It launches a local shell process like cmd, sh, etc. and in it executes a…

    2024 · xpipe.io · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    Hello HN community, I'm excited to share a new command-line tool I developed called purl, inspired by the simplicity of Perl one-liners for efficient text processing. Purl features include Perl-like regex that simplifies text manipulation, it's cross-platform so works equally well on macOS, Linux, etc., and it's quick and easy to install. The tool also supports simple commands such as -replace, -filter, and -exclude, and offers optional color output to enhance readability. Purl is a practical alternative to traditional tools like sed and grep, designed to address some of their common…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19
    Fastbatch▲135

    Simplify scheduling tasks on AWS EC2

    2023 · fastbatch.io · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    I got frustrated with Outlook, Gmail and Google drive search never being able to find anything in my Inbox or Cloud storage and decided to build a personal email and document search that works better. Selectric is a free MacOS app and currently supports Gmail, Outlook, Drive, Dropbox and Slack. The app is completely private. We index and store all data on your Mac. We also run AI models locally so no data ever needs to leave your computer. I'd love for the HN community to try us out and share feedback!

    2024 · selectric.io · its alternatives →

  21. 21CL
  22. 22

    I've built a tool called sol (like "soul") that helps you inspect and format complex shell one-liners. Features: - Choose which transformations you want (break on pipe, args, redirect, whatever) - "Peeks" into stringified commands (think xargs, parallel) and formats those, too - Auto-breaks at a given width (e.g., 80 characters) - Shows you non-standard aliases, functions, files, etc. that you might not have in your shell environment - Breaks up long jq lines with jqfmt because—let's be honest—they're getting out of hand As a security researcher and tool developer, I often encounter (or…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    Slice and dice logs on the command line. Contribute to rcoh/angle-grinder development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2021 · github.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    tap curl in your editor before it gets to sh it. Contribute to awalgarg/curl-tap-sh development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2016 · github.com · its alternatives →

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