TabStijl

Overview

TabStijl is a lightweight, modern, and customizable command-line tool that formats raw textual data into beautiful tabular outputs. Designed to "wrap" command-line output with style and structure, it supports a wide range of formatting features including themes, colorization, padding, borders, and text alignment.

Inspired by the minimalism and structure of De Stijl design philosophy, TabStijl transforms messy command output into readable, aesthetic tables — right in your terminal.

Getting Started

1. Download the executable file from the following link: Download tabstijl

2. Download install.sh from the following link: Download install.sh

3. Change install.sh permission to executable

   chmod +x install.sh

4. Run install.sh and follow the installation process

   ./install.sh

5. Check the TabStijl version to ensure that the installation process was successful

   tabstijl -v

   or

   tabstijl --version

Example

ls -l | tabstijl --hdata=permission,hard_links,owner,group,size,month,day,time,name --text-align=center --theme=matrix --border-style=double

Features

• Wraps any stdin stream into styled tables
• Rich styling for text and borders (color, bold, italic, etc.)
• Customizable border styles (heavy, double, star)
• Independent styling for header and body
• Accepts space, tab, newline, or whitespace separated data
• Alignment controls (left, center, right)
• Supports headers, with manual override (--hdata)
• Predefined themes: matrix, mecha, myth, retro, sticky
• Output simplification options (--simplify, --borderless)

Themes

Matrix

Mecha

Myth

Retro

Sticky

Contributing

TabStijl is an open-source project — contributions, suggestions, and feedback are highly welcome! Whether you're fixing a bug, adding a new theme, or just improving the documentation, feel free to open an issue or pull request. Let's make the command line beautiful together.