fff VS broot

As something of an old-timer here, there's some amusement, but mostly appreciation that people are discovering that these very old ways of doing things have a lot of potential (and a lot of untapped ideas)

Somewhat relatedly, recently I discovered the colorfully named fff. It's a solid file manager, but what I've used it for is a terminal based filespace navigator (by adding a function that just leaves you in the place you navigated to).

It's funny how it's hard to break the habit of "cd" to move around, despite this being way faster, especially if you're not sure where you're going.

https://github.com/dylanaraps/fff

Hi. fff, lf, clifm Won't say they're best or not, rather interesting and maybe worth looking at. Looked up for the z in termux's repos and it's called "zoxide" there.

According the git repo for fff there are several keybindings (maybe this is a bad design, idk) see https://github.com/dylanaraps/fff

Did you check fff?

https://github.com/dylanaraps/fff — better color support, image support, fast as fuck and written in widely installed pure BASH

fff - fast file manager written in bash https://github.com/dylanaraps/fff

Yes, there are many. One popular one is [ranger](https://github.com/ranger/ranger). Another, more minimal example is [fff](https://github.com/dylanaraps/fff).

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