Interactive CLI choosing mode (interactive task listing with filtering)

[iangregsondev]

Hi,

It would be really nice to be able to run taskfile in an interactive CLI choice mode.

i.e. A setting for "default" task to show the list of tasks, and using the cursor keys you get to choose and drill down until you find the one you are looking for. so i.e

Show all tasks and drill down into subtasks etc

task

OR

if I have a list of subtasks under the "exporter" taskfile then running

task exporter

would display all tasks for "exporter:" (a.k.a filtering) and allow choosing with the cursor keys or drilling down more i.e.

task: Available tasks for this project:
* exporter:build:linux:         Build exporter for Linux
* exporter:build:linux:prod:    Build exporter for Linux (production)
* exporter:build:mac:           Build exporter for Mac
* exporter:build:mac:prod:      Build exporter for Mac (production)
* exporter:release:             Release exporter
* exporter:release:snapshot:    Release exporter

exporter is actually a subtask i.e.

includes:
  exporter:
    taskfile: ./cmd/exporter/Taskfile.yml

Here is an example in the javascript ecosystem. https://www.npmjs.com/package/ntl , there are many others.

I thought it would be a nice addition.

Great product, by the way, I have dropped makefiles and use this now - everywhere :-)

[kerma]

Hello @iangregsondev! You could achieve something like this using fzf:

task -l | grep -v 'task: Available' | fzf --prompt="Available tasks: " | awk '{sub(/:$/, "", $2); print $2}' | xargs task

It needs a bit more work to get it properly working inside taskfile itself however.

---

EDIT: Here's a full example that works defined within taskfile itself:

version: '3'

vars:
  GREETING: Hello, World!

tasks:
  hello:
    desc: "say hello"
    cmds:
      - echo "{{.GREETING}}"
    silent: true

  default:
    cmds:
      - | 
        selected=$(task -l | grep -v "task: Available" | fzf --prompt="task:")
        echo "$selected" | awk '{sub(/:$/, "", $2); print $2}' | xargs task
    silent: true

[vctls]

Beautiful ❤️

You may want to add the flags -r and -o to xargs.
-r ensures xargs stops if no input is selected, otherwise you may not be able to exit your command if you're using the default task because xargs will keep calling task, even if you ctrl-C.
-o opens a TTY, which may be necessary if your selected task expects a terminal.

Also, I replaced awk with sed: sed -E 's/\* (.*?):\s.*$/\1/'
Splitting by column isn't compatible with included files, since the tasks will be prefixed by include_name:.

This is my final variation:

# Fetch the list of all the tasks,
# only keep lines for actual tasks,
# remove initial asterisk and tailing column,
# pipe through fzf for fuzzy matching,
# extract the actual command from the full line,
# send the command to task through xargs.
task -a | grep --color=never '*' \
      | sed 's/\* //;s/: //;s/  //' \
      | fzf --prompt="Available tasks: " \
      | sed -E 's/(\w+)\s.*$/\1/' \
      | xargs -ro task

I couldn't make the original colors work though pipes, so I added this to the global variables:

vars:
  # ANSI escape sequences
  ESC:
    sh: "printf '\\033'"
  NC: '{{.ESC}}[0m'
  RED: '{{.ESC}}[0;31m'
  BLUE: '{{.ESC}}[0;34m'

The variables can be used in sed and other commands.
Complete list of colors, among other sequences: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code#Colors

[iangregsondev]

Wow, i like it... There is one small issue though.

It removes the colon (:) from the wrong place

i.e.

• exporter:run: Run exporter

task: Task "exporterrun:" not found

But I like it, that's pretty cool.

[kerma]

corrected the regexp in awk: awk '{sub(/:$/, "", $2); print $2}'

[WladyX]

here is my version with gum:

    cmds:
      - |
        command -v brew >/dev/null || { echo "brew is mandatory for this to work, please install it"; exit 1; }
        command -v gum >/dev/null|| brew install gum

        selected=$(task --list-all | grep -v "task: Available" | grep -v "default:" | gum filter --indicator="->" --placeholder="Type to search for a task...")
        echo "$selected" | awk '{sub(/:$/, "", $2); print $2}' | xargs task