QALI (q)

Quick Aliasing

Purpose

QALI can...

• Shorten long & complex commands
• Act as a namespace for your custom scripts (stop worrying about conflicting names with system commands!)
• Make you type less
• Reduce your mental workload

Installation

Homebrew (for macOS)

brew tap JettChenT/qali
brew intall qali

From release

download the latest release of your platform, unzip, and move q and qali binaries to your bin folder (usually /usr/local/bin)

Cargo

A Rust installation is required

cargo install qali

Note for windows users:

To run the QALI on a windows machine without encoding errors, use windows terminal.

q.exe works...

but qali.exe somehow gets detected as a trojan virus (I wish I know how to make one (>_<)

This can be solved by allowing the "virus" in windows defender.

Luckily, qali.exe is not required for simple actions such as setting and executing an alias.

The Commands

This installs two separate binaries : q and qali.

The command q is meant for actions with the highest usage frequency, such as setting and alias or executing a command.

The command qali is meant as a companion allowing for subcommands and more functionality without influencing the namespace in q which is set reserved completly by the users.

Usage

q --help

qali --help

Supported alias types:

• Command: one liners, eg. q -s hi "echo hi"
• Shell: Shell scripts, eg. q -s hi hello.sh (EXPERIMENTAL) (Works iff your shell installation has the name "sh")
• Python: Python scripts, eg. q -s hi hello.py (EXPERIMENTAL) (Works iff your python command has the name "python")
• URI: open URI in default application, eg. q -s hi https://beta.sayhello.so

Examples:

Set an alias

Example: set gs as git status

q -s gs "git status"

Example: set cc to cargo check locally

q -s cc "cargo check" -m local

Set p as python if p doesn't exist

q p python 

Set hi to ./hi.py with qali

qali set hi ./hi.py

Execute aliases interactively (fuzzy select)

Method 1: q

Method 2: qali select

Execute aliases directly

Example: execute git status

q gs

Execute python --version (As of now, use -- when executing a command to stop flags meant for the program being parsed as flags for qali itself.)

q -- p --version

List all existing commands

qali list

Alternatively, you can set q -s ls "qali list" to shorten this.

Remove a command

Example: remove gs as git status:

qali remove gs

Alternatively, you can set q -s rm "qali remove" to shorten this.

Features to implement

• Better output formatting
• Subcommands
• Change storage method to json or other serde formats
• Allow users to set descriptions for each command
• Linking to shell scripts
• Linking to python scripts(support for python environments)
• TUI to navigate existing commands
• Implement fuzzy finding
• More customizable options eg. print-only