peek

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 / .__/\__/\__/_/\_\ 
/_/ a file previewer

Modern terminal file viewer — preview any file, any format.

📖 Browse the manual → — per-format details, keyboard shortcuts, extraction, themes, and the full CLI reference.

_{Glyph-matched 24-bit image rendering — a real photo, drawn with characters.}

• Syntax highlighting for 100+ languages via syntect
• Pretty-printing for JSON / YAML / TOML / XML
• Aligned tables for CSV / TSV with sticky header, type inference, streaming record reader
• SQLite databases — read-only schema listing + streaming row viewer with sliding-window cursor
• Spreadsheets — .xlsx / .xlsm / .ods: sheet listing → aligned table per sheet, CSV extract, workbook metadata
• Presentations — .pptx / .pptm / .ppsx / .odp: slide-by-slide text (n / p to step, per-slide search); Apple Keynote (.key) shows the embedded preview + metadata
• ASCII-art image rendering with glyph-matched 24-bit color. Animated gifs!
• Documents — Markdown, Jupyter notebooks (.ipynb), PDF, Adobe Illustrator (.ai), DOCX, ODT, RTF, EPUB, CBZ. PDF pages render as images with an optional reconstructed-text overlay (o) that writes the real text over the pixels at matching zoom
• Email — .eml messages and .mbox mailboxes: rendered headers + body, attachment listing + extract, message-list drill-in
• Calendar / contacts — iCalendar (.ics) and vCard (.vcf): rendered agenda / contact cards with human date-times, grouped fields, recurrence
• Vector / PostScript — EPS / PostScript (.eps, .ps): embedded preview, optional Ghostscript render, DSC metadata
• Containers — ZIP / tar / 7z / cpio / ar archives, ISO disk images, audio metadata
• Executables — ELF / Mach-O / PE / WebAssembly (.wasm) object files: header, sections, symbols
• Java classfiles — .class header, fields, methods with decoded signatures
• Certificates and keys — PEM / DER X.509 / CSR / CRL / keys / OpenSSH pubkeys / JWK: subject, validity, SANs, fingerprints, thumbprints
• Fonts — TrueType / OpenType / TTC collections / WOFF / WOFF2: rasterised specimen render + family / weight / glyphs / script coverage
• .DS_Store — Apple Finder's per-folder store decoded to a records table: icon positions, window geometry, view style, background, modification dates
• Hex dump fallback for binary, reachable from any view with x
• Interactive viewer with live theme cycling, info screen, extraction, text search (literal or regex), soft wrap, image zoom/pan

peek is a single-file viewer: one path (or stdin) at a time. Run peek once per file.

Install

macOS / Linux:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/thaapasa/peek/main/install.sh | sh

Installs the latest release into ~/.local/bin. Supports aarch64 and x86_64. Pin a version with PEEK_VERSION=v0.1.0 or relocate with PEEK_INSTALL_DIR=/usr/local/bin.

Manual downloads, Windows, building from source, and updating: see the Installation chapter of the manual.

Usage

Point peek at a file and it picks the view — source highlight, image render, structured pretty-print, paged document, container listing:

peek src/main.rs                    # source code, syntax highlighted
peek photo.jpg                      # image rendered as glyph-matched art
peek config.json                    # structured data, pretty-printed
peek book.epub                      # paged read with TOC + metadata
peek server.pem                     # certificate — subject, validity, SANs, fingerprints

But the file types are only half the tool. The same binary does operations on those files.

Inspect metadata — human-readable, or JSON for pipelines:

peek server.pem --info              # subject, issuer, validity, key type, SANs
peek photo.jpg --info --json | jq .image.width

_{peek photo.jpg --info — File, Image, and a detailed EXIF section.}

Re-render images — Sobel edge line-art (other modes: full / block / geo / ascii):

peek diagram.png -m contour
peek photo.jpg -m contour --edge-density 0.1   # denser edges

_{peek photo.jpg -m contour — the photo as glyph edge line-art.}

Browse and extract containers — list the entries, then pull one out:

peek archive.tar.gz --list                      # entry keys you feed back to --extract
peek book.epub --list
peek archive.tar.gz -x src/main.rs -o main.rs   # pull one entry, rename on the way out
peek archive.tar.gz -x logo.png -o -            # raw bytes straight to stdout

_{The interactive archive browser — a nested entry tree you can drill into.}

Force print mode (no interactive viewer) — pipe-friendly:

peek config.json -p | grep version
echo '{"a":1}' | peek               # stdin auto-detected

peek also reads executables, Java classfiles, fonts, calendars, vCards, .DS_Store, and more — see the manual for the full list.

Run peek -h for the short option list, peek --help for the full set, or read the manual for per-format details, keyboard shortcuts, extraction, themes, and the full CLI reference.

Manual

Full user manual: https://thaapasa.github.io/peek/.

Sources in manual/ — built with mdbook. Local preview:

cargo install mdbook
mdbook serve manual    # opens http://localhost:3000

Credits

Demo photo by Dmytro Koplyk on Unsplash. Full attribution for all bundled sample files: CREDITS.md.

Screenshots regenerate from repo fixtures with just demos (see just setup for the tooling).

License

MIT