Plugin catalog

preview

Prints a bounded terminal preview of a text file, image or archive without extracting or changing anything.

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Turn it on
Actions
Example
Permissions

preview prints a bounded view of a text file, image or archive in your terminal. It never extracts anything. Reach for it when you want to look inside a file or an archive while you're browsing a directory.

The start of lla/src/main.rs printed through bat, beginning with its mod declarations. — `lla plugin run preview show -- lla/src/main.rs`

Turn it on

The show action works whether or not the plugin is on. Turn it on to tag each entry with its preview kind and backend:

# ~/.config/lla/config.toml
enabled_plugins = ["preview"]

Or run lla --enable-plugin preview, which writes the same setting, so it stays on. lla --disable-plugin preview removes it.

Tags show in the default, long and table views. In the table view, the long text follows each row.

a.tar.gz [preview: archive via listing]
medium.bin [preview: unsupported via none]
note.txt [preview: text via bat]
pic.png [preview: image via metadata]
sub/ [preview: directory via none]

The plugin adds two typed string fields, preview_kind and preview_backend. Read them from JSON or show them as field:<name> columns:

lla --json | jq -c '.[] | {name, kind: .plugin.preview_kind, backend: .plugin.preview_backend}'

{"name":"note.txt","kind":"text","backend":"bat"}

Actions

Run an action with lla plugin run preview <action>.

Action	What it does
`show -- <path> [--lines N]`	Preview a file. `--lines` limits text output: 120 by default, 5000 at most
`backends`	Report which tools are on your `PATH`
`help`	Show help

All of them are interactive, so they need a TTY.

show picks a backend by file type and falls back when the tool is missing:

Kind	Files	Backend	Without it
Text	Common source, config and text formats, Markdown, and files with no extension	`bat --style=plain`	Prints the first 512 KiB, and refuses binary files
Image	`.png`, `.jpg`, `.jpeg`, `.gif`, `.webp`, `.bmp`, `.tiff`, `.tif`, `.avif`, `.heic`	`chafa` at 80x40	Prints the file's name and size, and a hint to install `chafa`
Archive	`.zip`, `.tar`, `.tar.gz`, `.tgz`, `.tar.xz`	`unzip -l` or `tar`	Lists `.zip` and `.tar` itself, up to 200 entries

Other compressed formats, such as .7z, .tar.bz2 or plain .gz, fail with Install tar, unzip, or 7z to list this compressed archive, even with those tools installed. Any other file type fails with No safe preview backend is available.

Example

lla plugin run preview show -- lla/src/main.rs --lines 4

mod commands;
mod config;
mod error;
mod filter;

lla plugin run preview backends

bat: available
chafa: not found (built-in fallback will be used where possible)
tar: available
unzip: available

Permissions

process = true, because the plugin runs bat, chafa, tar and unzip. It also has read:selection and read:user-path, so it can read the files you list or name.