acol

README

acol

Styles standard input in a tabular format like ls.

• Installation
• Testing
• Usage
• Alternatives

Installation

Install Go and run this command:

go get github.com/snsinfu/acol

Now acol is placed in GOPATH/bin (which is ~/go/bin by default).

Testing

Move to the repository root (or ~/go/github.com/snsinfu/acol) and

go test ./...

Usage

acol reads list of lines and formats the list into multiple columns. Like this:

% head -n 30 /usr/share/dict/words | acol
A      aam       Aaronic    Ab       abaca        abaciscus
a      Aani      Aaronical  aba      abacate      abacist
aa     aardvark  Aaronite   Ababdeh  abacay       aback
aal    aardwolf  Aaronitic  Ababua   abacinate    abactinal
aalii  Aaron     Aaru       abac     abacination  abactinally

Input may contain spaces and/or escape sequences (colored text):

Options

-h, --help   display help information
-r           use row-major ordering
-s[=2]       space between columns

Alternatives

The column command works similarly to acol. However, it does not handle colored text correctly. Also, the output of column is less packed than that of acol because of uniform column width.