asd: A Next-Generation Universal File Viewer

For decades, developers have relied on standard Unix tools like cat, less, and grep to interact with files in the terminal. While incredibly reliable, these tools lack modern conveniences. Enter asd, a lightning-fast, zero-dependency Go application designed to be the ultimate, all-in-one file viewer for modern developers.

With the release of v2.0.0, asd has officially transformed from a simple cat replacement into a fully-fledged terminal Swiss army knife.

Core Features & Architecture

asd is built in pure Go and utilizes an intelligent Handler Registry to sniff out file types dynamically using magic bytes and heuristics.

• 🎨 Beautiful Syntax Highlighting: Powered by alecthomas/chroma, asd instantly detects and highlights over 200+ programming languages out of the box with the gorgeous Dracula theme.
• 🖼️ Native Inline Images: No more downloading files to view them! asd natively renders JPG, PNG, GIF, and WEBP images directly inside modern terminals (like iTerm2, WezTerm, and Ghostty), seamlessly falling back to true-color ANSI block rendering on unsupported terminals.
• 🔀 Advanced Git Integration: Instantly see a live Git gutter diff directly alongside your source code. Or, use the --diff flag for a stunning side-by-side code comparison.
• 🗄️ Deep Archive & Office Extraction: Seamlessly peek inside .zip and .tar.gz archives without extracting them, and automatically extract plain text from .docx, .xlsx, and .pdf files.
• 👀 Log Tailing & Smart Parsing: Use asd -F /var/log/syslog to continuously tail log files. asd will intelligently detect timestamps and log levels, colorizing them dynamically on the fly.

The Next Frontier: v2.0 Features

Version 2.0 introduces bleeding-edge capabilities, turning asd into an intelligent workspace tool:

• 🧠 AI Explain Mode: Need to quickly understand a massive, undocumented script? Run asd --explain src/main.go. asd transparently connects to your local Ollama API, generates an AI-powered summary using Llama 3, and renders it in beautifully wrapped Markdown right above the code.
• 🌐 HTTP & API Fetching: Skip curl. Run asd https://api.github.com/users/vsmanu to natively fetch, detect, and syntax-highlight JSON payloads dynamically.
• 📒 Jupyter Notebook Rendering: asd acts as a native terminal parser for .ipynb files, elegantly combining glamour markdown rendering for documentation cells and syntax highlighting for code cells.
• 🗄️ SQLite TUI Dashboards: Passing asd database.sqlite no longer spits out binary garbage. Instead, it queries the database natively and prints out a beautifully formatted schema showing all tables, columns, and live row counts.
• 📊 Directory Dashboards: Point asd at a directory, and it will draw a styled file tree and render a dashboard summary detailing Git branch status, modified files, and directory statistics.

Built for Speed

Despite its massive feature set, asd remains a tiny ~12MB single binary. It intelligently handles massive multi-gigabyte files via streaming io.Reader pipelines, ensuring memory usage stays flat while maintaining blazing fast startup times.

It is the terminal file viewer, completely reimagined.