unpipe - pipe command output like it was never piped

unpipe lets you capture, pipe, page, or watch the rich output you normally only get on screen: colors, tables, progress bars, box drawing, and other ANSI rendering included.

Internally, unpipe uses a private detached tmux server and tmux capture-pane.

What It's For

Some commands look great on screen but lose their layout, colors, or useful view as soon as you pipe them. unpipe keeps that screen-style output intact and still lets you send it wherever you want.

unpipe --watch is a color-preserving watch alternative: it keeps ANSI output intact, lets you scroll through long results, and keeps your scroll position while the command refreshes.

The same capture path works for one-shot output and for piping rendered terminal output into another tool:

The images below use synthetic terminal-aware fixtures from examples/. They show the same modes with stable, deliberately simple data:

Examples

Render a terminal-aware command and print the captured output:

unpipe examples/tty-dashboard.sh

Pipe terminal-rendered output into bat:

unpipe examples/wide-report.sh | bat

When stdout is piped, unpipe applies a default -10 width compatibility offset so tools with side gutters, such as bat, do not wrap full-width table output. Disable that when the downstream command should receive the full-width capture:

unpipe --no-compat -- examples/wide-report.sh | cat

Control capture width explicitly:

unpipe --width 120 -- examples/wide-report.sh
unpipe --width-offset -14 -- examples/wide-report.sh | bat

Watch and rerender output without watch stripping or misinterpreting ANSI:

unpipe --watch 0.5 -- examples/live-status.sh

Watch Keys

q, Ctrl-C       quit
Up/k, Down/j   scroll one line
PgUp/PgDn      scroll one page
Home/g         top
End/G          bottom, and follow bottom on refresh
r              rerender now

Environment

UNPIPE_WIDTH          pane width; default: current terminal columns
UNPIPE_WIDTH_OFFSET   signed width offset; piped stdout defaults to -10 when unset
UNPIPE_HEIGHT         pane height; default: current terminal rows, or rows - 1 in watch mode
UNPIPE_HISTORY        tmux scrollback lines; default: 200000
UNPIPE_KEEPALIVE      seconds to keep pane alive after command exit; default: 3600
UNPIPE_TMUX           tmux binary; default: tmux
UNPIPE_PLAIN          strip rendered ANSI attributes when set to 1/yes/true/on

Build

cargo build --release

Install locally:

install -m 755 target/release/unpipe ~/.local/bin/unpipe

Legacy Python Version

The Rust binary is the primary implementation. The previous Python implementation is included as a legacy reference:

legacy/unpipe.py examples/tty-dashboard.sh
legacy/unpipe.py --watch 0.5 -- examples/live-status.sh

It uses the same command-line shape and UNPIPE_* environment variables, but new development should target the Rust implementation.

Tests

Run the Rust unit tests:

cargo test

Run the legacy Python tests:

python3 -m unittest legacy/test_unpipe.py

Runtime Requirements

• tmux
• stty
• date
• chmod
• bash available on PATH

No Cargo dependencies are used.