xplr VS fd

I use xplr and like it very much.

xplr

PIC stands for Preview Image in CLI, I think this should be explicit enough. I first made it because I needed a way to display images in the terminal (for an xplr plugin), but the more I worked on it, the better it got, as of now I have implemented 4 different ways to preview images (I couldn't find other ones), some can even display GIFs!

Certain file managers like xplr allow for more advanced terminal UX. Check out the video on https://xplr.dev/ and you can see something like a live/interactive ls that allows toggling arguments (instead of running multiple commands and pushing previous stdout further into the past).

xplr version 0.20.0 was released last week. If you haven't already, go ahead and install the latest version. This post will try to break down the changelog in the release in an easy-to-digest manner, looking through the perspective of different user groups.

Tool: https://xplr.dev

The Vim/Neovim ecosystem has gotten unbelievably better over the last 5-10 years. "Living in the terminal" for core development work is IMO better than pretty much anything else out there; my Neovim setup has a modern plugin manager; an IDE-like experience with fast autocompletion as I type, goto definition, and automated refactor support; and a side-drawer file browser navigable with Vim motions. It feels like an IDE, except that it launches in ~100ms and has ultra-low typing latency. Using it with tmux panes means I can have various drawers and panes with a series of full, incredibly fast terminals wherever I want, with long-running tasks like automated test watching/running while I edit code placed wherever I want around the editor panel. Not to mention the Cambrian explosion of "modern" terminal tooling getting built, like xplr [1], hyperfine [2], httpie [3], etc.

That being said, I think "living in the terminal" for general purpose computing, like browsing the web or talking to your coworkers, has been in a kind of frozen standstill while the rest of the world has moved on. I think it isn't worth trying to push non-dev work into the terminal currently.

1: https://github.com/sayanarijit/xplr

2: https://github.com/sharkdp/hyperfine

3: https://github.com/httpie/httpie

a terminal file manager built in rust I just heard about

I tried using nnn but didn't find it easy to adopt, now I'm looking at https://github.com/sayanarijit/xplr

ripgrep: A super-fast file searcher. You can install it using your system's package manager (e.g., brew install ripgrep on macOS). fd: Another blazing-fast file finder. Installation instructions can be found here: https://github.com/sharkdp/fd

hyperfine is such a great tool that it's one of the first I reach for when doing any sort of benchmarking.

I encourage anyone who's tried hyperfine and enjoyed it to also look at sharkdp's other utilities, they're all amazing in their own right with fd[1] being the one that perhaps get the most daily use for me and has totally replaced my use of find(1).

[1]: https://github.com/sharkdp/fd

You call it with `n` and get an interactive fuzzy search for your directories. If you do `n ` instead, it’ll start the find with `` already filled in (and if there’s only one match, jump to it directly). The `ls` is optional but I find that I like having the contents visible as soon as I change a directory.

I’m also including iCloud Drive but excluding the Library directory as that is too noisy. I have a separate `nl` function which searches just inside `~/Library` for when I need it, as well as other specialised `n` functions that search inside specific places that I need a lot.

¹ https://github.com/sharkdp/fd

² https://github.com/junegunn/fzf

Many (most?) of them have been overhauled with success. For find there is fd[1]. There's batcat, exa (ls), ripgrep, fzf, atuin (history), delta (diff) and many more.

Most are both backwards compatible and fresh and friendly. Your hardwon muscle memory still of good use. But there's sane flags and defaults too. It's faster, more colorful (if you wish), better integration with another (e.g. exa/eza or aware of git modifications). And, in my case, often features I never knew I needed (atuin sync!, ripgrep using gitignore).

1 https://github.com/sharkdp/fd

Descubra mais sobre o fd em: https://github.com/sharkdp/fd

AFAIK there is a find replacement with sane defaults: https://github.com/sharkdp/fd , a lot of people I know love it.

However, I already have this in my muscle memory:

fd

> without zsh globs I have to remember find syntax

My "solution" to this is using https://github.com/sharkdp/fd (even when in zsh and having glob support). I'm not sure if using a tool that's not present by default would be suitable for your use cases, but if you're considering alternate shells, I suspect you might be

Nice to see other alternatives to find. I personally use fd (https://github.com/sharkdp/fd) a lot, as I find the UX much better. There is one thing that I think could be better, around the difference between "wanting to list all files that follow a certain pattern" and "wanting to find one or a few specific files". Technically, those are the same, but an issue I'll often run into is wanting to search something in dotfiles (for example the Go tools), use the unrestricted mode, and it'll find the few files I'm looking for, alongside hundreds of files coming from some cache/backup directory somewhere. This happens even more with rg, as it'll look through the files contents.

I'm not sure if this is me not using the tool how I should, me not using Linux how I should, me using the wrong tool for this job, something missing from the tool or something else entirely. I wonder if other people have this similar "double usage issue", and I'm interested in ways to avoid it.