erdtree VS broot

The most substantial project that I have to show for my knowledge of the lower level topics is this project I work on in my spare-time called erdtree and I'm really banking on that to stand-in as "experience" in the absence of professional systems experience.

I'm working on this little project called erdtree and could use a bit of help adding information about file owners and permissions for the windows build if you're interested. No worries if not :)

I actually do put my main function in the middle

User feedback really helps drive erdtree's development so happy to accept input if you have any! And yeah et became erd because of name clashes with a lot of other existing packages.

I'm a self-taught developer working professionally as a director of engineering who writes Rust on weekends. I've been using Rust now for a little over 2 years and am the author and maintainer of this little command-line tool called erdtree. Before I was a programmer I did extensive tutoring in various subjects like organic chemistry, biochemistry, physics, calculus, etc..

Took a healthy break from this little open-source project I've been iterating on.. ready to get back to it this weekend :]

I personally use erdtree, it even uses icons to differentiate various kinds of files

Here’s a project that I work on in my spare time. I initially worked on a very bare bones version on a 6-hour plan ride back in spring of 2022 because I was bored and wanted to work on something challenging without the need for internet. After two days I posted a naive version onto GitHub and after like 6 months it got around 100 stars on GitHub so I then decided to give it special attention in January of this year and have been iterating on it since.

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