This one Linux terminal tool replaced half my text-processing commands
Tired of using many different commands, each with dozens of flags, to transform text? Meet sttr, a command line tool that can replace your entire word processing toolbox. Let’s see why this tool makes the “old way” of word processing seem like hard work.
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Installing str
There are many ways to install sttr on your Linux machine. The easiest way is to use the installation script provided by the developer.
curl -sfL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/abhimanyu003/sttr/main/install.sh | shAlways check the contents of a Bash script before running it.
If you are using Snap Package Manager, run:
sudo snap install sttrOn Arch Linux, use:
yay -S sttr-binSince sttr is created with Go, you can also install it using Go if you have it configured.
go install github.com/abhimanyu003/sttr@latestOnce installed, run the tool with this command:
sttr
You should get a similar result.
Try interactive mode
Launching the tool using the sttr command takes you into an input window. First, you need to enter your text. After that, to perform a transformation there, you need to enter two empty lines, as indicated by the tool. Once you do this, you are taken to a menu of all available options. You can use the up and down arrow keys or the K and J buttons to move items up and down. To navigate between pages, you can use the left and right arrow keys or the H and L keys.
This is interactive mode. You can also enter this mode using the appropriate flag, like this:
sttr interactive textSince there are a lot of items here, you can filter the one you’re looking for by pressing the forward slash (/) button. Once in filter mode, start typing the name of the operation you want to perform on your text.
Once you find the operation you want, press Enter, then select from the options. You can also press the Esc key to return. To see other options, you can press the question mark (?) button.
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Encoding, hashing, casing and other operations
sttr has so many operations, too many to cover here. So let’s review the ones I found most useful. While you can certainly use interactive mode, I’ve found that using direct commands is much faster. You write the name of the operation then pass your text as an argument.
sttr [operation] [your_text]sttr supports many different encoding schemes including base64, base32, base85, HTML decoding, ROT13 encryption and others. Let’s see some examples:
sttr base64-encode Hello
sttr base64-decode SGVsbG8=
sttr hex-encode Hello
sttr hex-decode 48656c6c6f
sttr morse-encode Hello
sttr morse-decode ".... . .-.. .-.. ---"
For text that contains spaces, you enclose them in double quotes. sttr supports popular hashing algorithms such as MD5 and SHA series.
sttr bcrypt hello
sttr md5 hello
sttr sha1 hello
sttr sha256 hello
sttr sha512 hello
The text manipulation features are where this tool shines the most. Think about the case. It supports many case types to transform your text.
sttr camel camel_case
sttr snake snakeCase
sttr kebab kebab_case
sttr pascal camelCase
sttr title "title case"
sttr lower UPPER
sttr upper lower
Apart from this, you can also reverse text, count words, characters, lines, remove spaces and newlines, etc. This also makes it a good choice for cleaning up messy files or getting quick statistics.
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Working with different file types
While text transformation seems impressive enough, support for different file formats is icing on the cake. If you are a developer, converting between JSON and YAML is a common task. You can do this using sttr.
sttr json-yaml file.json > file.yaml
Similarly, you can convert a YAML file to JSON file. Another useful conversion is from Markdown to HTML. You can then preview this content in a web browser by rendering the HTML file.
sttr markdown-html report.md
It’s not just about converting one file type to another. You can perform special operations on particular types of files. For example, when sending JSON data through certain shells or APIs, you often need to “escape” it to avoid syntax errors. You can do this in sttr by passing this JSON like this:
echo '{"id": 101, "msg": "Hello \"User\""}' | sttr json-escapeThe result should be an escaped version ready to use.
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In my experience, sttr has saved me a ton of headaches related to installing and switching between tools. If you want to learn more about the project, check out its official GitHub.
