broot VS z.lua

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.

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

https://github.com/skywind3000/z.lua is quite nice and has more features, e.g. fzf integration and an interactive mode.

Then install: - z.lua - better cd - exa - better ls - trash - rm deletes completely - trash moves files to trash, so you can recover them - massren - absolutely the best file/folder renamer (especially for devs) - tldr - better than man

wget https://github.com/skywind3000/z.lua/raw/master/ranger_zlua.pyi && chmod +x ~/.config/ranger/plugins/ranger_zlua.py

z.lua

I personally use z.lua, but if you're a Rust fan there's also zoxide. Both are multi-platform and highly configurable.

With z you can CD into a directory like ~/Documents/Foo/Bar/Baz by executing z baz.

I used to keep some directory bookmarks with apparix, but nowadays I just use z.lua.

Currently zabb mainly supports the zoxide implementation of z. It works ok with z.lua, fasd and z, but may not find the shortest abbreviations for those. It may work for other implementations if they support the z -e command. I welcome PRs to expand zabb to other implementations.