CmdCompass: Collect, Learn, and Recall All Your Terminal Commands

demo-long.mp4

Table of Contents

1. Screenshots
2. User Installation-Mac
3. User Installation-Windows
4. User Installation-Linux & Distro Compatibility
5. User Guide
6. Contributing

Screenshots

View Manual Page with Option Highlighting

Support 1000+ Cached Core Utility Man pages for instant Lookup. (With the ability to get ~90000 Man pages from ~60000 packages from download and converted to HTML)

User Installation - Mac

Step 1:

The tool uses groff (GNU Roff) to convert downloaded man pages to HTML.

Please install groff by:

brew install groff

Step 2:

• Download the dmg app installer from release. Open the installer and drag the CmdCompass app to your Application folder.

  

• For the first time only, open the Application folder on Finder, right-click the app and choose open. (This is to trust app because I am an "unreconized developer" and don't have 99 USD to pay for the Apple Developer Program to be able to sign a certificate to my app)

  

User Installation - Windows

• Download the zip or the 7z archive from release and decompress it. You are now ready to use the App (cmdCompass.exe)!

Note: When you open the app for the first time, the Windows Smart Screen will open, Windows will block the app because it is an "unreconized app". You have to click on More Info and then a button will show up for you to open the app. (The App remain unreconized unless I pay $$$ to get a certificate to sign my app)

In case you are wondering, for Windows, you don't need to install groff like Mac users. Groff is not available natively on Windows anyway but thanks to the project EZWinPorts, I have added the groff binary built for Windows to the Windows build.

User Installation - Linux

• Install groff with your package manager. Note on Debian or Ubuntu, even with groff already installed, you may likely need to run sudo apt install groff again as the pre-installed version is unable to convert to HTML documents, resulting in empty man HTML pages being displayed
• Download and decompress the app from release. You can just right-click and run the cmdCompass executable with GNOME or run with ./cmdCompass in terminal.

Below distros are tested:

• Ubuntu 24.04 with GNOME
• Debian 12.5.0 with GNOME
• CentOS-Stream-9 with GNOME
• Arch 2024.5.01 with GNOME

User Guide

GUI breakdown

Below is a breakdown of the different components and their use cases:

1. [Tag Definations] You can define your tags here with custom colors, and remove existing tags.

2. [Collection Management] You can choose an existing collection to view your command in this collection. Additionally, you can use the add ( ) and remove () buttons to add a new collection or remove the current selected collection.

3. [Command List] This List contains all your commands within the currently selected collection. You can use the select () button to view the command in detail in the right penale. Or you can click on the button to add/remove your existing tags to this command.

4. [Command Body] The full body of your command will be displayed here. You can use the copy () button on the right to copy this command to your clipboard. Note: the save () button will be enabled once you made changes to your command body.

5. [Comment Tab] You can add your comment for the selected command here.

6. [Man Page Tab] The man page of your current command will be displayed here. You can also choose to highlight your command options () to view the man pages with your options highlighted.

7. [Theme Switch] Toggle your theme between day and dark mode.

Enabling variable replacement

If you define your command with {{variable}}, an input box will be automatically created after the command body window. You can specify as many as you want as long as your variables are enclosed in {{}}.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please feel free to open issues or submit pull requests. The tool is still in early stage so please bear with me. :)

Please read CONTRIBUTING.md for the project structure and workflows.