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Comment by mkl | Hacker News Reader

This looks really neat. The demo uses a lot of shell pipes though, needing to type "pastel" out for every processing step. It would be convenient if something like

  pastel random | pastel mix red | pastel lighten 0.2 | pastel format hex

could be written

  pastel random mix red lighten 0.2 format hex

(not quite possible, I think) or

  pastel random then mix red then lighten 0.2 then format hex

or something.

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GStreamer uses the argument "!" as a pseudo-"|" so you can build multimedia pipelines without actually using Unix pipelines, or repeating the gst-launch command:

https://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/documentation/tutorials/ba...

That would be great.

  pastel random ! mix red ! lighten 0.2 ! format hex

I made a wrapper to support this: https://gist.github.com/ayosec/816ccba7a75aba5336db0fe0b9791...

Having written a large number of CLIs in the past, I've often come across this issue but never had a good solution. This is remarkably simple, elegant, and easily generalized into a CLI framework so it can be implemented with ease. Thank you for sharing this nugget of gold!

Sadly Zsh uses ! for history expansion so they'd all have to be escaped in that shell.

Even in the middle of a line, not just at the start?

Yes, and it's a great feature IMO:

    touch projects/new-lib/readme
    cd !!:1:h

Every shell can make its own version, but here's a wrapper in fish which I named pstl:

  eval (echo "pastel $argv" | sed 's/ | / | pastel /g')

Now you can

  pstl "random | mix red | lighten 0.2 | format hex"

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