entr VS nnn

entr ("Event Notify Test Runner"; GitHub), is a command-line tool written by Eric Radman that allows running arbitrary commands whenever files change.

I use something very similar on https://lunar.fyi and https://lowtechguys.com but I wouldn’t call this “simple” anymore.

They use Jinja templating, I prefer Slim (https://github.com/slim-template/slim#syntax-example) which has a more Pythonic syntax (there is plim [0] in Python for that)

I use Tailwind as well for terse styling and fast experimentation (allows me to write a darkMode-aware and responsive 100 line CSS in a single line with about 10 classes)

For interaction I can write CoffeeScript directly in the page [1] and have it compiled by plim.

I run a Caddy static server [2] and use Syncthing [3] to have every file save deployed instantly to my Hetzner server.

I use entr [4] and livereloadx [5] to rebuild the pages and do hot reload on file save. All the commands are managed in a simple Makefile [6]

———

You can already see how the footnotes take up a large chunk of this comment, this is not my idea of simple. Sure, the end result is readable static HTML and I never have to fight obscure React errors, but it’s a high effort setup for starters.

Simple for me would be: write markdown files for pages, a simple CSS for general styling (should be optional), click to deploy on my domain. Images should automatically be resized to multiple sizes and optimized, videos re-encoded for smaller filesize etc.

I have mostly implemented that for myself (https://notes.alinpanaitiu.com/How%20I%20write%20this%20blog...) but it feels fragile. I’d rather pay for a professional solution.

[0] https://plim.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

[1] https://github.com/FuzzyIdeas/lowtechguys/blob/main/src/rcmd...

[2] https://caddyserver.com/docs/command-line#caddy-file-server

[3] https://syncthing.net

[4] https://github.com/eradman/entr

[5] https://nitoyon.github.io/livereloadx/

[6] https://github.com/FuzzyIdeas/lowtechguys/blob/main/Makefile

Try entr for fast reloading. Another one is hupper.

entr

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.

The other option is to just download the static version https://github.com/jarun/nnn/releases/download/v4.9/nnn-nerd-static-4.9.x86_64.tar.gz and overwrite the Debian executable at /usr/bin/nnn, but this seems a bit hacky, agreed?

You can get the 'default' nuke plugin script from https://github.com/jarun/nnn/blob/master/plugins/nuke and customize it if you need to. You define files by extension or mime type and set default and fallback apps to be opened with.

I like nnn ( n3 ).

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