Smarter CLI gists

I’ve been tinkering with my dotfiles a lot recently, and wanted to show how I’m creating gists on the CLI these days.

First, you’ll need to install the gist application using brew install gist, then you’re going to add a new function to your shell via your .zshrc (or .bashrc or whatever flavour you enjoy).

All newly created gists on the CLI will make use of the following flags:

• create all gists as secret (-p)
• copy the gist url to the clipboard (-c)
• open the browser to the gist (-o)

The function that we create will extend the brew installed gist applications by supporting three modes for the CLI tool:

1. $ gist filename.json — create a gist from the filename.json with the name filename.json
2. $ cat filename.json | gist — create a new gist from STDIN
3. $ gist — paste whatever’s on the clipboard and create a new gist called paste.txt

This last one is fun and pretty much the reason I made this function. I tend to have something on my clipboard that I want to quickly share. I can now just type gist into my terminal and I’ll make a gist, show me the page (so I get visual confirmation it worked) and it’s already copied to my clipboard.

gist function

Copy and paste this bash function into your profile and you’ll have the extended functionality that I described above.

function gist() {
  local url=""

  # if there's nothing piped on STDIN
  if [ -t 0 ]; then
    # and there's no arguments...
    if ((! $# )); then
      # take what's on the clipboard and paste it in a new gist
      command gist -Pcop -f paste.txt
    else
      # create a gist based on the arguments give
      command gist -cop $@
    fi
  else
    # otherwise, create a gist, with arguments, but use the
    # content from STDIN
    command gist -cop $@ < /dev/stdin
  fi
}

Hope that’s useful. In fact, I’ve since evolved this script to pipe the output directly to the gitio command I have so I get short URL too!

Originally published on Remy Sharp’s b:log