up

Up, short for Ultimate Plumber, is a terminal tool for building Linux command pipelines interactively with a live preview. In Linux, a pipeline is a chain of text-processing commands where the output of one command feeds into the next. Normally you write the full chain, run it, see the result, adjust, and repeat. Up lets you do this in real time: you pipe some data into Up, then type your pipeline in an input box at the top of the screen, and the output appears immediately in a scrollable window below without having to press Enter after each adjustment.

The workflow is to redirect any command's output into Up, then write and refine your processing pipeline while watching the results update. You can scroll through the output and continue editing the pipeline. When you are satisfied, pressing Ctrl-X writes the finished pipeline command to a shell script file in your current directory so you can reuse it later. Pressing Ctrl-C exits without saving.

One practical note: because the pipeline runs live as you type, destructive commands like rm or dd would execute immediately. The README flags this clearly and recommends caution.

For long-running input sources, there is a way to freeze the input buffer so that commands like wc or sort, which need to see all input before producing output, will show results on the data collected so far rather than waiting indefinitely.

The tool is available as a binary download for Linux, and through package managers on Arch Linux, FreeBSD, and macOS. It is a hobby project written in Go by one developer, with macOS support described as community-maintained.