broot VS nnn

Take a look at broot https://github.com/Canop/broot

A past coworker implemented a system like this. It was awful. He was the gatekeeper because the numbers and names had to be "just so" to meet his approval, and he was the most senior person on the team. He was neurotic in general and a pain to work with.

The idea of limiting yourself to a few top-level categories in a directory hierarchy and then doing the same with subdirectories makes sense, but adding numbers is a bad idea. It just creates more work, and other people have to learn your idiosyncratic nomenclature. Just give the directories good names and get on with it. Search really isn't as bad as the article suggests, especially with something like broot [1].

[1]: https://github.com/Canop/broot

I've used a lot of the tools mentioned here in comments, but I think just for finding a directory/file broot[1] is much faster and easier than others. Though it is also quite feature rich but mostly it's just write a fuzzy search term that could even be sub-sub-directory and open, extremely quickly.

[1] https://github.com/Canop/broot

`broot` (https://github.com/Canop/broot) is another file manager with a curious interface that seems to fill a similar niche.

Of course, there are many other file managers to choose from (mc, ranger, nnn, lf, ....), but most of them don't show nested subdirectories by default.

As a macOS user, it boils my brain whenever I've to type in something like ~/Library/Application Support/org.rust-lang.Cargo/config.toml. macOS users have been begging CLI tools to support XDG variables on macOS too. Setting defaults is a strong indication to the community what should be the "preferred" locations. The defaults defined in your article will invariably lead to some authors saying that if that path is good enough for cargo, then it is good enough for their tool. Even the latest draft RFC acknowledges that macOS should use XDG variables too. I've written more about this here.

Definitely a fair sentiment. I personally like having a static visualizer handy because sometimes I just want to do a quick assessment rather than boot up an entire interactive CLI, but if interactivity is what you want broot has you covered :]

You may be interested in broot

I think you’re conflating different projects.

There are projects that aim for a better user experience, with better command line interface, defaults, performance and UI. These are of course breaking changes and the programs can’t be used as drop in replacement. Some examples are

- ls => exa (https://github.com/ogham/exa)

- grep => ripgrep (https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep)

- cat => bat (https://github.com/sharkdp/bat)

- tree => broot (https://github.com/Canop/broot)

The person you’re replying to was speaking of a different project - uutils (https://github.com/uutils/coreutils). These are drop in replacements with identical interfaces (modulo bugs).

Even better broot, previously adding view verb to config:

Broot: https://github.com/Canop/broot

If you want a file full browser experience choose nnn: https://github.com/jarun/nnn . If you have a desktop file for Helix you can use the Gnome Files program to make all your programming language files open in Helix.

I like nnn ( n3 ).

I am building nnn from source, and I used these instructions from the docs to set the theme (doesn't seem to apply to the icons however).

The icon-theme seems to be driven by your terminal font as detailed in `src/icons-in-terminal.h & icons.h, and the choice of "terminal-icon vs nerd-fonts vs emoji" appear to be hard-wired at compile-time rather than at run-time.

nnn

git clone https://github.com/jarun/nnn cd nnn make O_NERD=1

In case you haven't come across nnn earlier, it is a tiny full-featured terminal file manager written for performance and productivity - https://github.com/jarun/nnn