Zsh: Devouring Tools or Hiding the Terminal

 Computing, Linux  No Responses »
Jun 212020
 

There has been a bit of a rush on Youtube videos describing how to hide the terminal when running certain commands; when using the terminal as a file browser you may want to show a media file. And sometimes when showing that file, you may wish to hide the terminal – particularly on a small laptop screen.

Just for fun, I decided to take one of the recipes and adapt it for my working environment which revolves around the zsh when I am in a terminal window.

To start with, I need the xdo tool, which can be installed with :-

$ sudo apt install xdo

Once that is installed, I modified a shell script from https://github.com/salman-abedin/devour/blob/master/ into a zsh function. I created a function file within my FPATH (~/lib/zsh/functions/devour) :-

function devour {
  id=$(xdo id)
  xdo hide
  . $@
  xdo show "$id"
}

Note that I have deliberately not redirected stdout and stderr away.

I then added the following to my .zshrc :-

autoload devour

The next step is to create aliases for the commands you might want to run automatically in such a way :-

alias mpv="devour mpv"

Although I am not sure “devour” is the right word to use for this action, but I have yet to think of a better one.