Pipe | explorer

pipe-explorer is an interactive terminal UI (TUI) for building and debugging shell pipelines — one stage at a time.

• 🔧 Easily construct and modify shell pipelines
• ⚡ Parse output from commands that are normally slow
• 📂 No need for using temporary files

Demo

Features

• Stage-by-stage inspection — select any stage in your pipeline and see its output immediately
• Live editing — add, edit, or delete pipeline stages with an inline editor
• stdout / stderr / combined views — switch between output streams with 1, 2, 3
• ANSI color output — preserves terminal color sequences so colorized command output stays readable
• Stage caching — only change stages and their dependants are re-evaluated
• Save to file — write the currently viewed output to disk with s

Installation

Download a pre-built binary

Pre-built binaries for Linux, macOS, and Windows are attached to every commit in their respective build workflow. Download the archive for your platform, extract it, and place the pipe-explorer binary somewhere on your PATH.

Available pre-built binaries

Platform	Asset name
Linux x86-64 (static)	pipe-explorer-x86_64-unknown-linux-musl.tar.gz
macOS Apple Silicon	pipe-explorer-aarch64-apple-darwin.tar.gz
macOS Intel	pipe-explorer-x86_64-apple-darwin.tar.gz
Windows x86-64	pipe-explorer-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc.zip

Build from source

You need a stable Rust toolchain (Rust 1.85+).

git clone https://github.com/emanuelen5/pipe-explorer.git
cd pipe-explorer
cargo build --release
# Binary is at ./target/release/pipe-explorer

Usage

Launch pipe-explorer with an optional starting pipeline (stages must be separated by a literal pipe character \|):

# Start new empty session
pipe-explorer

# Start with a pre-defined 2-stage pipeline
pipe-explorer find . -name '*.rs' \| wc -l

# Debug a more complex pipeline
pipe-explorer cat /var/log/syslog \| grep ERROR \| awk '{print \$5}' \| sort \| uniq -c \| sort -rn

If you have simpler commands, you can use the --parse option to automatically try to split up commands based on the location of the pipe characters:

# Same command as above, but note that we had to use " as outer quotation marks.
# Single quotes would collide with the ones in the string.
pipe-explorer --parse "find . -name '*.rs' | wc -l"

Warning

YMMV, --parse only works for "simple" commands where you don't have complicated embedded strings nor | inside a string. You kind of have to know what you're doing.

Keybindings

Press ? while in the app to see all available keybindings.

Search

Press / to open the search bar at the bottom of the screen. Type a regex pattern and press Enter to confirm; matching text is highlighted in the output and the title bar shows the match count.

• Use n / p to jump forward / backward through all matches.
• Prefix the pattern with \c to search case-insensitively, or \C to force case-sensitive matching (default).
• Press Esc to clear highlights and leave search mode.

/ERROR\c     → case-insensitive search for "error"
/^[0-9]+     → lines that start with a number

License

GPL-3.0 — see LICENSE.