Command-line interface

Lesshand provides a command-line interface. It can be downloaded from the releases page or built from source.

The command-line interface has two commands: encode and decode. They each take a file path as their only argument and provide output on stdout.

The following is a shell function named lh that can be used to quickly open an editor to type Lesshand. When closing the editor, the expanded text will be copied to the clipboard. This works on Linux or macOS.

if [[ ${OSTYPE} == darwin* ]]; then
  clipboard() { pbcopy; }
else
  clipboard() { xsel -ib; }
fi

lh() {
  f=$(mktemp)
  trap "rm -f '${f}'" EXIT HUP INT QUIT TERM
  "${EDITOR}" "${f}"
  lesshand-cli decode "${f}" | clipboard
  rm -f "${f}"
}

(Caution: on some systems, mktemp may return a path with world-readable permissions.)