How-to guide
How-to guides
Recipes for tasks you already have in mind, each one task from start to finish.
Each guide solves one task. It assumes aless is installed and that you know your way around a terminal, and it links to the command line reference for every option it uses.
- Install aless
- Install aless on Linux, macOS or Windows, from a release, with Homebrew or with Cargo, and check what you downloaded.
- Set up completions and the man page
- Have your shell complete aless's options and their values, and man show its manual page, however you installed aless.
- Choose the format aless reads
- Read a file whose name does not tell its format, or standard input, as the format you name.
- Follow a file as it changes
- Keep a file open in the viewer while it is written, rewritten or regenerated, with your place kept, and stop following it when you want it still.
- Copy a value or its path
- Copy the focused node's value, its key or its path from the viewer, on a desktop or over SSH.
- Get values out of a file in a script
- Print the value at a path as JSON, in any of the formats aless reads, for jq, a script or an agent to use.
- Convert a file to another format
- Write a document, or the records in it, as CSV, YAML, TOML, a Markdown table or any other format aless can write, streamed as it reads.
- Check that files parse
- Find out which of a set of files do not parse, where and why, in a terminal or a CI job.
- Read a format aless does not know
- Describe a line-oriented text format in ABNF, and read its files in the viewer and from the command line like any built-in format.
- Reshape a document with a program
- Run a program in the alchemy language over a document, to choose, rename and arrange its values as a table, written as CSV, JSON or any format aless writes.
- See a document beside its conversion
- Open the output of --render or --alchemy in a pane next to the document, and keep it current as the document changes.
- Browse a directory
- Open a directory as a tree in the viewer, find a file in it, and open the file in a tab.
- Give an agent aless
- Install the Agent Skill that teaches an AI agent to read, query, check and convert files with aless's command line.