television

television (or tv) is a fast, extensible fuzzy finder for the terminal built around the concept of channels. A channel is any source of items to search — files, git branches, git log, environment variables, processes, Docker images, and more. You switch between channels on the fly, each with its own preview, keybindings, and behaviour.

It is built in Rust on top of Tokio for async I/O and uses a custom fuzzy matching engine for near-instant results even on very large datasets.

Features

• Channel-based — each data source (files, git log, env vars, etc.) is a first-class channel with its own preview and behaviour; switch between them with a keystroke
• Fast — asynchronous backend means results stream in without blocking the UI, even for slow sources
• Rich previews — syntax-highlighted file previews via the same engine as bat; contextual previews for git commits, env vars, and more
• Shell integration — integrates with bash, zsh, and fish for ctrl+r history search and ctrl+t file picking, replacing fzf in those keybindings
• Remote control — a cable system allows other programs to drive television as a selection backend
• Extensible — custom channels can be defined in the config file using arbitrary shell commands as data sources
• Keyboard-driven — vim-style navigation, configurable keybindings throughout

Installation

cargo install television

Or via your system package manager:

# macOS
brew install television

# Arch Linux
pacman -S television

# Nix
nix-env -iA nixpkgs.television

Pre-built binaries are available on the releases page.

# Debian / Fedora
# Pre-built Linux binaries (.deb and .rpm) are available on the
# [releases page](https://github.com/alexpasmantier/television/releases).

Usage

# Open the file channel (default)
tv

# Open a specific channel
tv files
tv git-log
tv git-branches
tv env

# Pipe input into television for arbitrary fuzzy selection
cat /etc/hosts | tv stdin

# Use as a selection backend in a script
selected=$(ls /usr/bin | tv stdin)
echo "You selected: $selected"

Shell integration

Add television to your shell for ctrl+r history and ctrl+t file picking:

# bash (~/.bashrc)
eval "$(tv init bash)"

# zsh (~/.zshrc)
eval "$(tv init zsh)"

# fish (~/.config/fish/config.fish)
tv init fish | source

Once set up:

• Ctrl+r opens the shell history channel
• Ctrl+t opens the file channel

Built-in Channels

Custom Channels

Define your own channels in ~/.config/television/config.toml:

[[channel]]
name = "docker-images"
source_command = "docker images --format '{{.Repository}}:{{.Tag}}'"
preview_command = "docker inspect {}"

[[channel]]
name = "brew-packages"
source_command = "brew list"
preview_command = "brew info {}"

[[channel]]
name = "todos"
source_command = "rg --line-number 'TODO|FIXME' --color never"
preview_command = "bat --highlight-line {2} {1}"

Keybindings

television vs fzf

fzf is a general-purpose fuzzy filter that accepts any piped input. television is higher-level: each channel is a self-contained unit with its own data sourcing, preview rendering, and contextual behaviour built in. You get a richer out-of-the-box experience for common tasks (files, git, history) without writing shell pipelines, while still being able to define arbitrary custom channels when you need to.