fixit

fixit is a terminal application that fixes mistakes in your commands inspired by The Fuck. It is also designed to be fast as fuck (more about that in the "Why?" section).

See contributing guidelines here. If you want to help fixit move forward, see the roadmap.

How it works?

When you run the fix command, it gets the last command from the shell history. Then one of two things happen:

• The previous command is re-run to get its output.
• The output of the previous command is retrieved via your terminal emulator/multiplexer API (see the list of supported software).

Once fixit has the command output, it runs the command and its output through a number of rules to determine appropriate fixes. After you select a fix it is run automatically and added to your shell history.

Installation

Any Linux distro that uses apt (Ubuntu, Debian, Mint, etc):

echo "deb [arch=$(dpkg --print-architecture) trusted=yes] https://eugene-babichenko.github.io/fixit/ppa ./" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/fixit.list > /dev/null
sudo apt update
sudo apt install fixit

For Arch Linux users fixit is available on AUR (build from source):

yay -S fixit

x86_64 and aarch64 pre-built binaries are available as well:

yay -S fixit-bin

Using Homebrew/Linuxbrew:

brew install eugene-babichenko/fixit/fixit

Installing with Cargo (you will need the Rust toolchain):

cargo install fixit-cli

You can also download pre-built binaries for Linux (static binaries) and macOS from Releases.

Shell setup

Add the corresponding line to your shell configuration file

bash:

eval "$(fixit init bash)"

zsh:

eval "$(fixit init zsh)"

fish:

fixit init fish | source

Powershell:

Invoke-Expression (fixit init powershell | Out-String)

Teminal emulator/multiplexer setup

kitty

You can skip this section if you are using tmux inside Kitty. Quick completions work out of the box with tmux.

This is optional, but without this fixit will fall back to just re-running the command, which is going to be slower.

To make quick completions work, you need to enable remote control. This is required, because this application uses kitty @ get-text to retrieve the command output. For the best performance and stability you are advised to set up shell integration.

Other software

You do not need any additional setup.

Software with quick fixes available

Terminal multiplexers:

• tmux
• Zellij

Teminal emulators:

• iTerm
• kitty
• Wezterm
• Terminal.app

Usage

Having a command that broke? Just type fix.

Configuration

Initialization

You can change the name of the alias by providing the --name argument to the init command:

fixit init --name f fish | source

This will generate the command named f instead of fix.

Fixing

Environment variables:

• FIXIT_PAGE_SIZE regulates how many suggestions per page you will see. The default is 5.
• FIXIT_QUICK_ENABLE - when running inside a supported terminal emulator/multiplexer, try to get the command output with its API instead of re-running the given command. This is generally much faster, so it is recommended that you leave it as is unless you run into any bugs associated with finding fixes. The combination that can be potentially buggy is suppported terminal emulator with unsupported multiplexer when the failed command is not visible on the screen. The default value is true. Pass false to disable.
• FIXIT_QUICK_SEARCH_DEPTH sets the number of lines to get from the scrollback buffer in addition to what we see on the screen. The default is 1000.

Logging

Environment variables:

• FIXIT_LOG controls logging. The default log level is error. For development purposes you generally need to enable the debug level (FIXIT_LOG=debug). The logger is pretty flexible and you can learn more from the env_logger documentation page.
• FIXIT_LOG_STYLE controls logger styling. Refer to env_logger docs for this as well.

Available rules

• brew_update_upgrade - replace brew update with brew upgrade when trying to update a Homebrew package.
• cargo_install_cwd - fix cargo install without arguments (it requires --path).
• cargo_wrong_command - fix misspelled cargo commands.
• command_not_found - search for misspelled command through $PATH.
• cp_cwd - cp came with only one argument, maybe you want to copy to the current dir?
• cp_dir - add -R to cp when you are attempting to copy a directory.
• git_add_all_lowercase - correct git add -a to git add -A.
• git_commit_no_changes - suggest using git commit -a.
• git_no_upstream - set upstream branch when pushing.
• git_wrong_command - fix misspelled git commands.
• mkdir_missing_parent - suggest using mkdir -p to create missing in-between directories.
• rm_dir - add -r to rm when trying to remove a directory.
• sudo - prepend with sudo when permission to execute a command was denied.

Roadmap

• Automatic update check
• Deal with complex commands (e.g. env var specification included: FOO=bar command -arg)
• Quick suggestions without re-running commands:
  • Via terminal emulator/multiplexer API
    • tmux
    • kitty
      • Get only the last command output with shell integration.
    • WezTerm
    • iTerm2
    • Zellij
    • Apple Terminal.app
  • Get terminal logs by running an arbitrary command.
  • Get the output of the previous command by running an arbitrary command.
  • Wrap around shell to read its logs (a la The Fuck instant mode).
  • Recognize OSC 133 escape sequences. This will help to determine command output boundaries.
• Shell support
  • bash
  • zsh
  • fish
  • Powershell
• Automated testing
  • Integration tests supported shells (headless)
  • Integration tests for supported emulators/multiplexers.
• Optional removal of a failed command from history.
• Packaging
  • Homebrew
  • AUR
  • deb
  • rpm
  • NixOS
  • anything else

Why?

While The Fuck is certainly magnificient, it does have a fatal flaw: it is written in Python. With all due respect, Python is slow and this does harm the user experience in two ways:

• It creates a perceivable and annoying slowdown during the shell startup, because it is written in Python.
• The fixes themselves can be rather slow.

On top of that, sometimes system-wide Python packages just break. In fact, this happened to me while I've been writing this page and trying to do benchmarks.

The intention behind fixit is to solve this by the re-write in a natively compiled language. Namely, in Rust. This removes the overhead of the Python interpreter and opens up the potential to search for fixes utilizing all of the CPU cores.

On "instant mode"

The Fuck has a feature called "instant mode" where it wraps around your shell to log output and read it instead of re-running the previous command. While this approach is certainly useful and has the benefit of being available on every terminal emulator locally, over SSH remotely, and without any additional terminal configuration, I am not a big fan of it. Going this way can mess with your shell output and creates a mess of nested processes. I am not totally against it and would totally love if someone implements it for me, but for this application the preferred way is to integrate with the terminal emulator API if such option is available. The ones that I'm aware of with appropriate APIs are WezTerm, kitty and iTerm2 .This way you do not create an additional layer between a shell and a user and the fallback to just re-running a command is very straightforward without editing shell configuration files.