television/docs/channels.md

📺 Built-in Channels

The following built-in channels are currently available:

• files: search through files in a directory tree.
• text: search through textual content in a directory tree.
• git-repos: search through git repositories anywhere on the file system.
• env: search through environment variables and their values.
• alias: search through shell aliases and their values.
• stdin: search through lines of text from stdin.

🍿 Cable channels

Tired of broadcast television? Want to watch your favorite shows on demand? television has you covered with cable channels. Cable channels are channels that are not built-in to television but are instead provided by the community.

You can find a list of cable channels ideas on the wiki.

Installing cable channels

Installing cable channels is as simple as creating provider files in your configuration folder.

A provider file is a *channels.toml file that contains cable channel prototypes defined as follows:

my-custom-channels.toml

[[cable_channel]]
name = "git-log"
source_command = 'git log --oneline --date=short --pretty="format:%h %s %an %cd" "$@"'
preview_command = 'git show -p --stat --pretty=fuller --color=always {0}'

[[cable_channel]]
name = "my-dotfiles"
source_command = 'fd -t f . $HOME/.config'
preview_command = 'bat -n --color=always {0}'

This would add two new cable channels to television available:

• using the remote control mode
• through the cli (e.g. tv git-log, tv my-dotfiles)

Deciding which part of the source command output to pass to the previewer:

By default, each line of the source command can be passed to the previewer using {}.

If you wish to pass only a part of the output to the previewer, you may do so by specifying the preview_delimiter to use as a separator and refering to the desired part using the corresponding index.

Example:

[[cable_channel]]
name = "Disney channel"
source_command = 'echo "one:two:three:four" && echo "five:six:seven:eight"'
preview_command = 'echo {2}'
preview_delimiter = ':'
# which will pass "three" and "seven" to the preview command