xplr VS ranger.vim

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

Explorers: https://github.com/ranger/ranger (Excellent terminal file explorer) you can integrate it with fasd (or z probably) to quickly find frecent files https://github.com/clvv/fasd https://github.com/rafaqz/ranger.vim (vim integration) Or https://github.com/Shougo/defx.nvim (vim file explorer by the infamous shougo)

There are also some ranger plugins that provide some additional functionality, like inserting the path of the file you navigate to in ranger at your cursor. https://github.com/rafaqz/ranger.vim Or https://github.com/LoricAndre/OneTerm.nvim Which does a lot of other things, but also can open ranger in a floating window. (Not my plugins, just recommending)