Trying to use Visidata to view GitHub links

[frosencrantz]

I’ve been interested in having vd reroute some URLs from common links to more useful URLs, where the intention is clear. For example, GitHub repo links, I want the repo data, and not the web page. There are other things that would be useful, some links I use require using a special version of curl/wget like tools. and it would be useful to have visidata call those tools to open the links.

So I was curious how installers like uv are able to quickly download only a specific version of a repo, and learned about the download links like:

• http://github.com/saulpw/visidata/archive/refs/heads/develop.tar.gz
• http://github.com/saulpw/visidata/archive/refs/heads/develop.zip

So I tried out both of these links, and found several issues:

• The zip link fails, since github doesn’t support the content-length header used as part of the optimizations done by unzip_http. We get the stack trace saying so.
• The tar.gz doesn’t work, no data, no exceptions. This is unexpected
• When I use curl to down both of these I note that zip has more presentation, the columns are closer to what we get with DirSheets. The TarSheet columns could be made more "modern", similar to ZipSheet/DirSheet.

[midichef]

Improving the TarSheet columns is simple, so I've opened a PR for that: #2834

[frosencrantz]

@midichef will one or more of your pull requests fix the other issues? Like #2655?

[midichef]

No. But for the zip files on servers that don't allow fetching ranges, I have been sitting on a finished fix. If you'd like to try it:
https://github.com/midichef/visidata/tree/remote_zip_draft
I haven't made a PR for it yet.

For remote .tar.gz files I have an exploratory workaround. If that's useful to you in the short-term, I can clean it up and push up a branch out. But it was not a clean fix, so I won't make a PR for it.

[frosencrantz]

The remote_zip_draft appears to work. Thank you! No need for a short-term fix, though if you fix it proper that would be nice.

[midichef]

fyi remote_zip_draft will download the zip file twice. I don't have a fix for that coming any time soon.