I'm playing around with choose. It's pretty cool, but what would increase coolness by 1000% is if one could control the position of the choose box on the screen. E.g., I'd want it in the upper left corner of the screen.

Currently, it can be dragged anywhere, but the position is not remembered between launches.

Perhaps a cmdline flag to set the screen coordinates of the box's northwest corner. E.g., ls | choose --location=0x22. At least this way, one won't have to mess with storing the position in a preference plist.

Choose seems to pick dark mode or light mode based on what's behind it on the screen (I guess?). Dark mode is OK, but light mode has low contrast between text and background for the non-selected items and I can barely read them.

I see there's a new 1.1 release but it's not on homebrew yet it seems so I can't easily test the new CLI options yet. I'm using 1.0 currently.

Hi, thank you for creating choose! I've been enjoying it a lot and is the best minimal selection tool that is native for macos. The main usage I give it is to open apps and run scripts. I couldn't believe that others apps charge for that second feature.

In that regard, there are 3 different directories where the apps are. The 'Application' folder you see in finder is a lie, it doesn't have any symlinks but the files inside may have different paths.

May be beyond the scope of the project, but with just a one liner you can list apps from your system in choose without the '.app' extension, and run them with the macos 'open' command (it can also run scripts. I didn't notice time differences with running scripts the normal way). So I thought that having that option out-of-the-box might be useful for some people.

Again, I know that it might defeat the purpose of minimal stdin/stdout selection, but it would be great if you think is ok to at least add it to the examples section in the readme file. I'd happily make a PR for that :)

Following the instructions to build the documentation initially failed on my system. Installing dos2unix and trying again fixed the issue.

I can prepare one if you like?

👋 trying to build the latest release, but run into some build issue. The error log is as below:

  ld: file not found: /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Toolchains/XcodeDefault.xctoolchain/usr/lib/arc/libarclite_macosx.a

full build log, https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/actions/runs/4664963366/jobs/8257857387
relates to Homebrew/homebrew-core#128042

(Meaning the Mojave feature.)

Just a suggestion.

This is wonderful!
But Could you add personal config to this program? Like the font and the background?
Thank you so much!

Currently there is only one release which is also used from brew. With that version, features like the changing the background color are inexistent.

Could you do a new release with the actual state of the code?

Thanks! 😊

A feature I'd like is to be able to execute a command upon selecting from choose. The reason is that I currently leverage the existing choose program to pipe in choices from pass that I can select to copy to my clipboard.

The problem is that there is a bit of a delay from when I select from choose and when pass is able to copy to my clipboard. If I can execute directly from choose, I can provide a spinner or some indicator that it is still processing, rather than accidentally sending the wrong clipboard contents to some other application because I moved too quickly.

would be useful, especially to show more than one example use case.

you can use https://github.com/sveinbjornt/ManDrake to create it quite easily.

I think this shouldn't be too hard using fzf --no-sort --filter "$query".

It would be cool if we could select multiple elements, and choose would return them separated by newline, something like using -m and tab with fzf:

Now that it's possible to return a value that was not one of the initial options (-m), it would be useful to be able to paste a string into the input field.

Add a command line flag that allows pre-populating the query with some text. For example:

ls | choose -q ie

Would open choose with "ie" as the query text like so:

@sdegutis, I can maintain this, although I may deprecate functionality I don't use to simplify the repo. I (and several others I know) use the CLI interface for quite a few tools like feeding in password selection from the www.passwordstore.org tool.

Hi, and thanks for a very cool app. I have been trying to adapt some of my workflow from linux (using rofi) to Mac, and choose has made it possible to great extent.

• I would like to request to be able to trigger choose without piping in any list of options. This is so I can use it in scripts to capture simple text. Basically, I want to be able to get just the entry box with $ choose -m.

• Also to have to option to paste text from the clipboard.

• Finally, to have the option to display the number of matches.

Thanks in advance!

I would like this tool to be used for writing a path and return that path. The idea is to be triggered and the user could write a path that will be fuzzy searchable. This mostly to make it easy to use the output for using an editor to open the final path.

???? | choose | open_with_editor $1

So, the idea is to have something like Alfred/Raycast/Rofi that you could write and find paths.

Hi,

First thanks for this helpful tool.
Second, I feel that how the search is performed is not that great. Consider having the following 2 lines:
* ssh server target ServerAliveInterval=50 -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no jumper host
* dns nameserver dhcp start --gateway subnet
Now if you search by 'ssh' you will get the second line in first which shouldn't be the case since there's no 'ssh' word in it. Also if you search for 'ssh target' still it won't get the 1st line which contains both tokens 'ssh' and 'target' to be displayed on top. Any ideas ?

Also I'm willing to support this project!

I would like to -- short of having to hack the code and compile from source -- be able to map the UP and DOWN bindings to ^K and ^J respectively. This is for us who have fzf(1) keybindings burnt into our fingers.

(I could have a go at adding this functionality myself, especially if we can think of a clean way to exposing this functionality and we're short of time.)

choose is a great app! However, unlike (for example) fzf, it is blocking. What this means is that if you pipe to choose, it will not open until stdin closes. If, for example, you run ls -R ~ | choose - which for many people is a long operation - no results are shown until ls is complete. It would be great if choose could dynamically update like fzf does.

Thanks for your work on this great program.

Currently, there are only short flags used to pass into choose, would it be possible to have long hand flags with double dash -- to improve the readibility?

Greetings!

Just an FYI, I've added this great tool to nixpkgs: NixOS/nixpkgs#288931

Please let me know if this is an issue 😄 Will be closing this since it's not really an issue.

Thanks!

First of, I'd like to say huge thanks for writing 'choose'. I am coming to OSX from Linux (with dmenu) and was looking all over the place for something like this. So, thanks! this is really really helpful, and working great.

There is one small capability I am missing, though:
When I type in a string that does not match any of the items on the list, and then press "Enter",
I'd like 'choose' to not perform cancel, but instead to return the string that I entered. If I wanted to cancel, I could still do it using the Esc key. This way, I could distinguish between two cases:
(1) I canceled because I changed my mind
(2) I did not find the item I was looking for, which was actually string X.

It looks like a tiny change (changing line 459 to write the queryField instead of canceling?), but unfortunately I don't know Objective-C at all and am afraid I'll be missing something.
Also, I really don't want to install the full-blown xcode suite just for this :(

Thanks again for your consideration!

I think it would be great if we had more options with controlling colors in choose, now some of them are hardcoded, which blocks some ideas for customising, I think we should add options like this:

• set color of choose window (so we could create dark background one)
• set alpha channel of all colors, not just RGB value
• change icon next to input field (maybe just as a string, with UTF-8 there's lots of options to use different arrows)