peek

A plugin for nerd: previews for files nerd would otherwise show as binary or raw. Select one in the tree and the preview shows:

Risk level 0: it only shows things. It has no network and writes nothing outside its own data folder. A database is opened read only and immutable, so nothing is written beside it, and with sqlite3's -safe, so nothing in it can read or write another file. Immutable also means a database another program is writing in WAL mode shows what its main file holds, without the newest changes. Each program it runs is stopped after 3 seconds, a whole preview after 8 seconds (it says so). Selecting another file stops the one before; the program it was running stops within 3 seconds. A notebook over 32 MB is not read.

demo.cast is a recording of it (asciinema), made with sample files.

Install

In nerd: Plugins… in the main menu, then peek. Or in a terminal:

nerd --plugin-add https://github.com/nerdterm/nerd-plugin-peek

Requirements

nerd 0.7.0 or later, and macOS 15 or later (for /usr/bin/jq). It uses only programs that come with macOS: sqlite3, unzip, tar, gzip, plutil, openssl, awk, perl.

Development

sh test/test.sh builds sample files of every kind, previews each through a stand-in for nerd's socket and checks the result. nerd --plugin-check --catalog . and nerd --plugin-trial . check the plugin as the catalog will.

Licence

MIT, see LICENSE.