Asd: A fast, AI-native cat replacement written in Go

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A smart universal file viewer for the modern terminal.

asd replaces traditional tools like cat with smart, type-aware file rendering. By automatically detecting file types via magic bytes (and falling back to extensions), asd formats and renders them with beautiful syntax highlighting, layout tables, tree views, and media metadata.

When you output more text than your terminal can fit, asd instantly buffers into an interactive pager. If you pipe the output to another tool, it smartly defaults back to raw bytes (behaving exactly like cat).

🚀 Features

Code & Text: Beautiful syntax highlighting using Chroma, with line numbers and theme support.

Structured Data: JSON, YAML, TOML formatting and valid syntax checking.

Data Tables: CSV and TSV formatted into beautiful, auto-sizing terminal tables via Lipgloss.

Markdown: Fully styled Markdown rendering using Glamour.

Archives: Explores zip, tar, tar.gz, 7z, and rar as interactive directory trees showing uncompressed stats.

Office Docs & PDF: Automatically extracts and parses text from DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, ODT, and PDFs without you needing to extract them manually!

Media: Peeks into Audio and Video files to reveal track metadata, codecs, and durations. Images are rendered natively in your terminal! Enjoy pixel-perfect inline images on modern terminals like iTerm2, WezTerm, and Ghostty, or elegantly scaled true-color ANSI blocks on all standard terminals.

Security: Displays X.509 PEM/CRT properties and SSH Key parameters effortlessly.

Git Integration: Built-in gutter diffs show added, modified, and removed lines instantly!

Tail/Follow Mode: Use asd -F to tail streaming logs with full real-time syntax highlighting.

Log Formatting: Intelligent, on-the-fly parsing and beautiful colorization of log files (.log, /var/log/*, etc) formatting timestamps and log levels neatly!

Side-by-Side Diffing: Use asd --diff for a beautiful side-by-side terminal diff view.

Certificate Parsing: Peek into .pem, .crt, and .der files to automatically parse X.509 certificates and read their metadata (Issuer, Subject, Validity) just like openssl x509 -text!

UI Customization: Use --clean to hide headers and line numbers for clean copying, or --no-pager to disable auto-paging.

Smart Piped Input: Pass curl payloads directly into asd; it automatically detects the content type and highlights the piped output!

Directories: View styled ls -la directory trees and resolve symlinks.

Hex Dump: Safely view unknown binaries with built-in hex-dumping.

📦 Installation

Using Homebrew (macOS/Linux)

brew tap orchestrator-dev/asd
brew install asd

Using Go

Ensure you have Go 1.23 or higher.

go install github.com/orchestrator-dev/asd@latest

Download Pre-built Binaries

Head over to the Releases page to download pre-built binaries for your OS and architecture (Windows, macOS, Linux).

Note: The GitHub Actions workflows are actively compiling v0.8.3, so the binaries will appear on the release page momentarily!

📖 Usage

Using asd is as simple as using cat.

asd [flags] [file...]

Examples:

Read a simple text or code file (syntax highlighted)

asd main.go

Read multiple files at once

asd config.yaml payload.json

Read a compressed archive without unzipping

asd data.zip

Pipe from another program (reads stdin)

echo "{"test": 123}" | asd

Flags

Flag Long Flag Description

-f --flat Bypass all smart rendering and act identically to cat.

-n --lines Show line numbers alongside text and source code.

-p --plain Disable all color and styling (good for older terminals).

--theme Specify a chroma highlight theme (default is auto).

-h --help Print usage and help menus.

--version Print the current version and exit.

⚙️ Configuration

You can customize asd permanently using a global config file located at ~/.config/asd/config.toml:

Set your preferred Chroma theme for syntax highlighting

theme = "dracula"

🛠 Compilation and Development

git clone https://github.com/vsmanu/asd.git
cd asd
go mod download
make build

You can run the tests using:

make test

📄 License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.

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A smart universal file viewer in Go

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golang

terminal

file-viewer

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Jun 4, 2026

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