Watch replacement

Viddy

There can't be too many alternatives to the watch command. It's a brilliant little utility that is typically used to run a certain command at a set interval so you can monitor any changing output. You might use it to check the temperature of something, for example, or track the amount of free memory you have left. It's a great little tool for building simple scripts to monitor changes or catch errors. What watch lacks, however, is more dynamic output options, and this is something that the Go-written Viddy attempts to address. Viddy is named after a famous quote in A Clockwork Orange (which likely was itself inspired by vidi, the Latin word for "I saw"), and it performs exactly the same function as watch with some modern augmentation. The most useful of these augmentations is a diff mode to highlight exactly which parts of any output have changed. This is very useful on more complicated commands because any changes are immediately colored in yellow, letting you easily see which values are new.

If you do happen to miss the moment when a value changes, another Viddy feature will let you roll back the output through its history so you can see what changed and when. All this can be controlled with Vim-like bindings, which can be edited, and in full color, which can also be configured to your own taste. The output is pageable so you can easily scroll up or down, or page through large volumes of output, and you can suspend and resume whatever you're running directly from within Viddy. The resulting upgrades to watch are likely to make Viddy a far more common occurrence in your command history, and the perfect tool for any ad hoc monitoring and system data tracking jobs.

Project Website

https://github.com/sachaos/viddy

Viddy can be used to track output changes and even to monitor suspicious journal activity.

Process launcher