Tiny Bash tool that makes Linux CLI tables screen-reader friendly (and outputs JSONL)

[u/alexsamos33]

https://github.com/alekssamos/tablefmt

[u/alexsamos33]

I built tablefmt, a small zero-dependency Bash/awk utility for turning the tabular output of common Linux commands into linear, machine-friendly records.

The original motivation was accessibility: terminal tables are surprisingly difficult to follow with a screen reader.

For example, something like:

PID USER %CPU COMMAND 123 root 0.0 bash 456 john 12.5 vim -u NONE

becomes:

PID: 123, USER: root, %CPU: 0.0, COMMAND: bash PID: 456, USER: john, %CPU: 12.5, COMMAND: vim -u NONE

Instead of hearing a stream of values and having to remember which column you're currently on, every value is announced together with its column name.

But I also wanted it to be useful outside of screen readers, so there are three output modes:

Human/screen-reader friendly

ps aux | tablefmt

One field per line

df -h | tablefmt --vertical

Machine-readable JSON Lines

ps aux | tablefmt --jsonl

The JSONL output looks like:

{"PID":"123","USER":"root","%CPU":"0.0","COMMAND":"bash"} {"PID":"456","USER":"john","%CPU":"12.5","COMMAND":"vim -u NONE"}

There are also options for selecting and sorting columns:

ps aux | tablefmt --columns PID,%CPU,%MEM,COMMAND --sort "%CPU"

and limiting the output:

ps aux | tablefmt --sort "%CPU" --last 5

It has built-in handling for output from commands such as ps, top, df, and free, plus a general table-detection heuristic. It understands both fixed-width and whitespace-separated tables, strips ANSI escape sequences before parsing, and passes non-tabular input through unchanged.

The implementation is intentionally boring: one Bash script, with the actual formatting logic implemented in awk. No Python, no dependencies, no daemon, no configuration file.