Television

Television includes a wide variety of built-in channels for navigating different data sources and system components. Some notable channels include:

• System & Shell: procs (manage running processes), sesh (session manager), ssh (ssh hosts), distrobox (manage containers), path (select PATH directories).
• Development Tools: git (diff, log, reflog), gh (GitHub), kubernetes (deployments, pods, services), justfile (Justfile recipes), tldr (tldr pages), man (man pages).
• Cloud & Infrastructure: aws (Buckets and Instances).
• Package Managers: guix (Guix packages).
• File System: files (includes goto_parent_dir action).

The community has developed several integrations for television:

• VSCode Extension: Available on the VSCode Marketplace.
• Vim/Neovim Plugin: tv.vim (https://github.com/prabirshrestha/tv.vim).
• Yazi Plugin: Available at https://github.com/cap153/tv.yazi.

To create a new channel, create a TOML file in your television cable directory (typically ~/.config/television/cable/). A minimal channel requires a [metadata] section with a name and a [source] section with a command.

Example of a minimal channel file:

[metadata]
name = "my-awesome-channel"

[source]
command = "aws s3 ls my-bucket"

When editing input within Television, the following default keybindings are available:

• Backspace: Delete the previous character
• Ctrl + w: Delete the previous word
• Ctrl + u: Delete the current line
• Delete: Delete the next character
• ← / →: Move the cursor left / right
• Home / End: Move to the start / end of input
• Ctrl + a / e: Move to the start / end of input

Television supports custom cable channels which can be used to define your own data sources.

Key capabilities:

• Overriding Builtins: Custom cable channels can be configured to override built-in channels.
• Action Support: You can add support for exec actions within your channels.
• Preview Integration: Use builtin previewers inside cable channel prototypes. You can also make previews optional for specific cable channels.

You can create custom channels for any workflow by defining a TOML file in ~/.config/television/cable/. A channel definition includes metadata, a source command, a preview command, and optional keybindings and actions.

Example tldr.toml configuration:

# ~/.config/television/cable/tldr.toml
[metadata]
name = "tldr"
description = "Browse TLDR pages"

[source]
command = "tldr --list"

[preview]
command = "tldr '{}'"

[keybindings]
ctrl-e = "actions:open"

[actions.open]
command = "tldr '{}'"
mode = "execute"

To debug complex templates, use the tv CLI flags to test your templates against controlled input.

• --source-command: Provides the input string that the template will process.
• --preview-command: Allows you to see how the template expands in a preview context.

Example Debugging Command:

tv --source-command "echo 'a:b:c'" --preview-command "echo 'Field 0: {split:\::0}, Field 1: {split:\::1}'"

The man-pages channel lets you browse and preview system manual pages using apropos and man.

Requirements: apropos, man

Usage:

• Use enter to open the selected man page in your system pager.

[metadata]
name = "man-pages"
description = "Browse and preview system manual pages"
requirements = [ "apropos", "man",]

[source]
command = "apropos ."

[preview]
command = "man '{0}'"

[keybindings]
enter = "actions:open"

[ui]
layout = "portrait"

[preview.env]
MANWIDTH = "80"

[actions.open]
description = "Open the selected man page in the system pager"
command = "man '{0}'"
mode = "execute"

[ui.preview_panel]
header = "{0}"

Television uses a single configuration file in TOML format. The application looks for this file in the following locations depending on your platform:

• Linux: $HOME/.config/television/config.toml
• macOS: $HOME/.config/television/config.toml
• Windows: %LocalAppData%\television\config\config.toml

If $XDG_CONFIG_HOME is set, the application will look in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/television/config.toml.

You can override the default configuration path by setting the TELEVISION_CONFIG environment variable to the directory containing your config.toml (e.g., TELEVISION_CONFIG=/path/to/dir will cause the app to look for /path/to/dir/config.toml).

Use pacman to install the package.

pacman -S television