10 ms·

Show HN: Xplr – A hackable, minimal, fast TUI file explorer

205 points by sayanarijit 6y ago

smitty1e 6y ago
"Cool," said dired. https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Dired.html https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Di...
- kqr 6y ago
  And Sunrise Commander, the dual-pane dired that works even more like an orthodox file manager. https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Sunrise_Commander https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Sunrise_Commander
  - gerikson 6y ago
    The name itself a reference to Midnight Commander, inspired by Norton Commander...
- OskarS 6y ago
  Ugh, I find dired incredibly annoying and avoid it at all costs in Emacs. You use it once and suddenly have a gazillion buffers open, it's just the worst! They don't even go away when you deliberately close them with q!
  - satish-setty 6y ago
    Of course, it can be customized. (put 'dired-find-alternate-file 'disabled nil) https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/DiredReuseDirectoryBuffer https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/DiredReuseDirectoryBuffer
    - OskarS 6y ago
      This does not solve the issue, if you enter a folder with RET (a slightly more obvious key than `a`), it still opens a new buffer for every directory. What you would have to do is to remap the key in dired's keymap. Which still doesn't solve the issue that it keeps the buffer open even though you close it with `q`, which requires some other fix. Or: you can use a file manager that isn't made by crazy people, which is what I do. I say this as a loyal Emacs user: there are so many things in Emacs that are amazing (org-mode and magit are the two famous ones obviously, but a personal favorite is Emacs calc, which is just a work of art), but dired is not one of them.
      - mouldysammich 6y ago
        I wouldnt say dired is made by crazy people, It just doesnt fit your expectations I like that it opens multiple windows it makes it easy to quickly jump between directories. I dont worry about having a clean list of buffers though but it never gets in my way
  - globular-toast 6y ago
    Why do you care about open buffers? When I first started using emacs I cared because other text editors force you to care by displaying "tabs" or the like for each open buffer. But emacs is better than that. The only time I ever see all open buffers is if I do M-x list-buffers, and I never do that. Other than that, open buffers never get in the way. I do use midnight-mode to kill all "old" buffers in the middle of the night to stop the memory usage growing indefinitely, though.
  - chalst 6y ago
    A buffer per directory is just the right thing for dired to do, for the same kind of reason that it is right that git has a staging area. Your problem is that this behaviour causes friction with how you prefer to manage buffers. Some suggestions: - With the regular buffer list, if you keep typing letters, the view will restrict to buffers containing that string - All the usual selection narrowing options, e.g. Helm, work here - You can rebind 'q' to 'kill-buffer-and-its-windows - A lot of people like ibuffer, which allows you to group kinds of buffer in its buffer list, e.g. all dired buffers
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- catern 6y ago
  My favorite dired feature is that if you C-x C-q (the standard Emacs binding to toggle the read-only status of a file), it makes the directory buffer writable. You can then edit the buffer like a regular file, including changing file names (or symbolic link targets, or other things, I presume), and when you're done, C-c C-c and it applies all the changes as renamed files, symbolic link retargeting, etc etc. Very handy, since you can use all the usual Emacs features like query-replace or kmacros while doing it.
conradludgate 6y ago
This is really cool! I use a similar tool for fuzzy cd[0]. At the moment I'm trying to use broot[1] as my directory browser but I might consider trying this too [0]: https://github.com/b4b4r07/enhancd https://github.com/b4b4r07/enhancd [1]: https://github.com/Canop/broot https://github.com/Canop/broot
ducktective 6y ago
There is also nnn and Vifm (C), lf (Go) and ranger (Python)
- sayanarijit 6y ago
  Also listed them https://github.com/sayanarijit/xplr/wiki/Alternatives https://github.com/sayanarijit/xplr/wiki/Alternatives
  - ducktective 6y ago
    Nice project btw! Were you experienced in C&C++ before learning Rust?
    - sayanarijit 6y ago
      Thanks. I only have some competitive programming experience with c++ and Java. I used Python and Elm in my last job.
tartoran 6y ago
I use Ranger but the hackability potential in this is very promising, I’ll definitely give it a spin. Thanks for posting!
- sayanarijit 6y ago
  Great. Looking forward to hearing how it goes.
ruph123 6y ago
You forgot „written in Rust“ for a 10x upvote multiplier. Looks great!
- sayanarijit 6y ago
  Haha. Missed this the 2nd time.
  - sayanarijit 6y ago
    Updated :)
    - ruph123 6y ago
      Nice!
- nikeee 6y ago
  Feels like "(as a millionaire)" on YouTube.
anhanhanh 6y ago
> written in rust Most important. Go get those sweet sweet internet points
the8472 6y ago
But does it support mouse control, and drag&drop or media content preview?
- sayanarijit 6y ago
  Not yet. It's supposed to be minimal, so I doubt it'll ever support mouse, drap & drop and other GUI features. Although, the preview is in list as a potential plugin. See https://github.com/sayanarijit/xplr/wiki/Plugins https://github.com/sayanarijit/xplr/wiki/Plugins and https://github.com/sayanarijit/xplr/wiki/TODO https://github.com/sayanarijit/xplr/wiki/TODO
windowsnoobz 6y ago
Noob question: How can I use this on Windows?
- sayanarijit 6y ago
  I haven't tested it on Windows yet, but as per the following comment, it should work fine on Windows-Linux subsystem. https://www.reddit.com/r/commandline/comments/mjot3a/xplr_a_hackable_minimal_fast_tui_file_explorer/gtbtvn7 https://www.reddit.com/r/commandline/comments/mjot3a/xplr_a_...
  - sayanarijit 6y ago
    i.e. use the Linux binary on WSL
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
fulafel 6y ago
The file specifying the dependencies is over 1000 lines long (https://github.com/sayanarijit/xplr/blob/main/Cargo.lock https://github.com/sayanarijit/xplr/blob/main/Cargo.lock) - there are different types of minimal of course, and a small amount of code leveraging a lot of deps is valid, but is does make one think. OTOH the highest voted comment as of this writing is comparing it to dired, so it's no worse than the competition I guess :)
- sayanarijit 6y ago
  Thanks for your comment. I realized that I missed clarifying the type of "minimal" I want to pursue. I have updated the wiki accordingly. https://github.com/sayanarijit/xplr/wiki/Features#minimalist https://github.com/sayanarijit/xplr/wiki/Features#minimalist.
- __jem 6y ago
  This is a lockfile, not the manifest for dependencies, so it includes all the translative dependencies as well. The list of direct dependencies is significantly smaller: https://github.com/sayanarijit/xplr/blob/main/Cargo.toml#L15-L24 https://github.com/sayanarijit/xplr/blob/main/Cargo.toml#L15....
  - fulafel 6y ago
    Yep, it's true that there's a shorter list of the direct dependencies. But surely the transitive dependency set is the better signal about the actual amount of 3rd party code pulled in.
    - shakow 6y ago
      > But surely the transitive dependency set is the better signal Oh man, I do have some bad news for you if you start counting the lines in the libc or the libc++.
      - fulafel 6y ago
        Sure, we can extend this so that we consider the functionality provided by the base language as well. But third party code pulled in is qualitatively different.
sim_card_map 6y ago
> minimal > cargo.lock has 1100 lines
- dathinab 6y ago
  - Cargo lock has a very verbose format. - Cargo lock contains "test" dependencies, in this case the criterion benchmark suite. Without it it's ~750 lines. - It's actually "only" 10 direct dependencies and including transitive ones 60. - Some dependency are the same dependency split into multiple parts e.g. foobar and foobar-core count as two dependencies. - Some dependencies are also build-only dependencies, e.g. derive related dependencies like `syn`.
PestoDiRucola 6y ago
Ahh yes, written in Rust, my favorite feature.
- woah 6y ago
  When you see a “Show HN”, the odds are very high that it is written in an ergonomic language such as Python, JS, Go, or Rust, rather than C or C++. Rust is the only one of these that has native performance, so I think this is useful information.
  - laurent123456 6y ago
    Meanwhile, in the comments below: > just having it open and doing nothing with it, it has extremely high cpu usage > it's maxing out 3 cores for me
    - sayanarijit 6y ago
      I'm aware of it and will start working on it shortly. https://github.com/sayanarijit/xplr/issues/10 https://github.com/sayanarijit/xplr/issues/10
      - sayanarijit 6y ago
        Fixed here https://github.com/sayanarijit/xplr/releases/tag/v0.3.3 https://github.com/sayanarijit/xplr/releases/tag/v0.3.3
- livre 6y ago
  For software that isn't in the package repository of your distro written in Rust (or Go or any other language with something similar to cargo) means I can clone the repository, run a build command and it'll likely compile easily and successfully. As a user this is much better than hunting down dev package names and versions for a C or C++ source.
pjmlp 6y ago
I guess it is time to revive Turbo Vision.
- drran 6y ago
  Revived with Unicode support[0], but nobody ported it to Rust yet. [0]: https://github.com/magiblot/tvision https://github.com/magiblot/tvision
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    I am aware of it. :) Porting it to Rust wouldn't produce the same developer experience, unless one wants to see Rc<RefCell<>> and . clone () everywhere.
    - drran 6y ago
      It can be implemented as background UI thread, with message passing.
GekkePrutser 6y ago
Interesting, I will try it! But it will have to be pretty good to replace mc for me. It's not that mc is very good, because it's not. It's just that its keystrokes are deeply ingrained in my muscle memory :) But this looks good and quicker to use (navigating the menu in mc takes a lot of keystrokes)
- sayanarijit 6y ago
  You should be able to configure the key bindings like mc https://github.com/sayanarijit/xplr/wiki/Key-Bindings https://github.com/sayanarijit/xplr/wiki/Key-Bindings
resoluteteeth 6y ago
I like it, but just having it open and doing nothing with it, it has extremely high cpu usage.
- hundchenkatze 6y ago
  Same here, it's maxing out 3 cores for me.
  - sayanarijit 6y ago
    I'll start working on it shortly. https://github.com/sayanarijit/xplr/issues/10 https://github.com/sayanarijit/xplr/issues/10
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - sayanarijit 6y ago
    Fixed here https://github.com/sayanarijit/xplr/releases/tag/v0.3.3 https://github.com/sayanarijit/xplr/releases/tag/v0.3.3
    - hundchenkatze 6y ago
      Excellent! Thank You!
- codychan 6y ago
  Same here, I just play with it around 30s before I notice CPU problem.
shomyo 6y ago
'written in rust' is new 'Tips Fedora'
smusamashah 6y ago
There is also broot https://dystroy.org/broot/ https://dystroy.org/broot/
- sayanarijit 6y ago
  Listed https://github.com/sayanarijit/xplr/wiki/Alternatives https://github.com/sayanarijit/xplr/wiki/Alternatives

205 points by sayanarijit 6y ago

"Cool," said dired. https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Dired.html https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Di...

kqr 6y ago
And Sunrise Commander, the dual-pane dired that works even more like an orthodox file manager. https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Sunrise_Commander https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Sunrise_Commander
- gerikson 6y ago
  The name itself a reference to Midnight Commander, inspired by Norton Commander...
OskarS 6y ago
Ugh, I find dired incredibly annoying and avoid it at all costs in Emacs. You use it once and suddenly have a gazillion buffers open, it's just the worst! They don't even go away when you deliberately close them with q!
- satish-setty 6y ago
  Of course, it can be customized. (put 'dired-find-alternate-file 'disabled nil) https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/DiredReuseDirectoryBuffer https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/DiredReuseDirectoryBuffer
  - OskarS 6y ago
    This does not solve the issue, if you enter a folder with RET (a slightly more obvious key than `a`), it still opens a new buffer for every directory. What you would have to do is to remap the key in dired's keymap. Which still doesn't solve the issue that it keeps the buffer open even though you close it with `q`, which requires some other fix. Or: you can use a file manager that isn't made by crazy people, which is what I do. I say this as a loyal Emacs user: there are so many things in Emacs that are amazing (org-mode and magit are the two famous ones obviously, but a personal favorite is Emacs calc, which is just a work of art), but dired is not one of them.
    - mouldysammich 6y ago
      I wouldnt say dired is made by crazy people, It just doesnt fit your expectations I like that it opens multiple windows it makes it easy to quickly jump between directories. I dont worry about having a clean list of buffers though but it never gets in my way
- globular-toast 6y ago
  Why do you care about open buffers? When I first started using emacs I cared because other text editors force you to care by displaying "tabs" or the like for each open buffer. But emacs is better than that. The only time I ever see all open buffers is if I do M-x list-buffers, and I never do that. Other than that, open buffers never get in the way. I do use midnight-mode to kill all "old" buffers in the middle of the night to stop the memory usage growing indefinitely, though.
- chalst 6y ago
  A buffer per directory is just the right thing for dired to do, for the same kind of reason that it is right that git has a staging area. Your problem is that this behaviour causes friction with how you prefer to manage buffers. Some suggestions: - With the regular buffer list, if you keep typing letters, the view will restrict to buffers containing that string - All the usual selection narrowing options, e.g. Helm, work here - You can rebind 'q' to 'kill-buffer-and-its-windows - A lot of people like ibuffer, which allows you to group kinds of buffer in its buffer list, e.g. all dired buffers
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
catern 6y ago
My favorite dired feature is that if you C-x C-q (the standard Emacs binding to toggle the read-only status of a file), it makes the directory buffer writable. You can then edit the buffer like a regular file, including changing file names (or symbolic link targets, or other things, I presume), and when you're done, C-c C-c and it applies all the changes as renamed files, symbolic link retargeting, etc etc. Very handy, since you can use all the usual Emacs features like query-replace or kmacros while doing it.

conradludgate 6y ago

This is really cool! I use a similar tool for fuzzy cd[0]. At the moment I'm trying to use broot[1] as my directory browser but I might consider trying this too [0]: https://github.com/b4b4r07/enhancd https://github.com/b4b4r07/enhancd [1]: https://github.com/Canop/broot https://github.com/Canop/broot

ducktective 6y ago

There is also nnn and Vifm (C), lf (Go) and ranger (Python)

sayanarijit 6y ago
Also listed them https://github.com/sayanarijit/xplr/wiki/Alternatives https://github.com/sayanarijit/xplr/wiki/Alternatives
- ducktective 6y ago
  Nice project btw! Were you experienced in C&C++ before learning Rust?
  - sayanarijit 6y ago
    Thanks. I only have some competitive programming experience with c++ and Java. I used Python and Elm in my last job.

tartoran 6y ago

I use Ranger but the hackability potential in this is very promising, I’ll definitely give it a spin. Thanks for posting!

sayanarijit 6y ago
Great. Looking forward to hearing how it goes.

ruph123 6y ago

You forgot „written in Rust“ for a 10x upvote multiplier. Looks great!

sayanarijit 6y ago
Haha. Missed this the 2nd time.
- sayanarijit 6y ago
  Updated :)
  - ruph123 6y ago
    Nice!
nikeee 6y ago
Feels like "(as a millionaire)" on YouTube.

anhanhanh 6y ago

> written in rust Most important. Go get those sweet sweet internet points

the8472 6y ago

But does it support mouse control, and drag&drop or media content preview?

sayanarijit 6y ago
Not yet. It's supposed to be minimal, so I doubt it'll ever support mouse, drap & drop and other GUI features. Although, the preview is in list as a potential plugin. See https://github.com/sayanarijit/xplr/wiki/Plugins https://github.com/sayanarijit/xplr/wiki/Plugins and https://github.com/sayanarijit/xplr/wiki/TODO https://github.com/sayanarijit/xplr/wiki/TODO

windowsnoobz 6y ago

Noob question: How can I use this on Windows?

sayanarijit 6y ago
I haven't tested it on Windows yet, but as per the following comment, it should work fine on Windows-Linux subsystem. https://www.reddit.com/r/commandline/comments/mjot3a/xplr_a_hackable_minimal_fast_tui_file_explorer/gtbtvn7 https://www.reddit.com/r/commandline/comments/mjot3a/xplr_a_...
- sayanarijit 6y ago
  i.e. use the Linux binary on WSL

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

fulafel 6y ago

The file specifying the dependencies is over 1000 lines long (https://github.com/sayanarijit/xplr/blob/main/Cargo.lock https://github.com/sayanarijit/xplr/blob/main/Cargo.lock) - there are different types of minimal of course, and a small amount of code leveraging a lot of deps is valid, but is does make one think. OTOH the highest voted comment as of this writing is comparing it to dired, so it's no worse than the competition I guess :)

sayanarijit 6y ago
Thanks for your comment. I realized that I missed clarifying the type of "minimal" I want to pursue. I have updated the wiki accordingly. https://github.com/sayanarijit/xplr/wiki/Features#minimalist https://github.com/sayanarijit/xplr/wiki/Features#minimalist.
__jem 6y ago
This is a lockfile, not the manifest for dependencies, so it includes all the translative dependencies as well. The list of direct dependencies is significantly smaller: https://github.com/sayanarijit/xplr/blob/main/Cargo.toml#L15-L24 https://github.com/sayanarijit/xplr/blob/main/Cargo.toml#L15....
- fulafel 6y ago
  Yep, it's true that there's a shorter list of the direct dependencies. But surely the transitive dependency set is the better signal about the actual amount of 3rd party code pulled in.
  - shakow 6y ago
    > But surely the transitive dependency set is the better signal Oh man, I do have some bad news for you if you start counting the lines in the libc or the libc++.
    - fulafel 6y ago
      Sure, we can extend this so that we consider the functionality provided by the base language as well. But third party code pulled in is qualitatively different.

sim_card_map 6y ago

> minimal > cargo.lock has 1100 lines

dathinab 6y ago
- Cargo lock has a very verbose format. - Cargo lock contains "test" dependencies, in this case the criterion benchmark suite. Without it it's ~750 lines. - It's actually "only" 10 direct dependencies and including transitive ones 60. - Some dependency are the same dependency split into multiple parts e.g. foobar and foobar-core count as two dependencies. - Some dependencies are also build-only dependencies, e.g. derive related dependencies like `syn`.

PestoDiRucola 6y ago

Ahh yes, written in Rust, my favorite feature.

woah 6y ago
When you see a “Show HN”, the odds are very high that it is written in an ergonomic language such as Python, JS, Go, or Rust, rather than C or C++. Rust is the only one of these that has native performance, so I think this is useful information.
- laurent123456 6y ago
  Meanwhile, in the comments below: > just having it open and doing nothing with it, it has extremely high cpu usage > it's maxing out 3 cores for me
  - sayanarijit 6y ago
    I'm aware of it and will start working on it shortly. https://github.com/sayanarijit/xplr/issues/10 https://github.com/sayanarijit/xplr/issues/10
    - sayanarijit 6y ago
      Fixed here https://github.com/sayanarijit/xplr/releases/tag/v0.3.3 https://github.com/sayanarijit/xplr/releases/tag/v0.3.3
livre 6y ago
For software that isn't in the package repository of your distro written in Rust (or Go or any other language with something similar to cargo) means I can clone the repository, run a build command and it'll likely compile easily and successfully. As a user this is much better than hunting down dev package names and versions for a C or C++ source.

pjmlp 6y ago

I guess it is time to revive Turbo Vision.

drran 6y ago
Revived with Unicode support[0], but nobody ported it to Rust yet. [0]: https://github.com/magiblot/tvision https://github.com/magiblot/tvision
- pjmlp 6y ago
  I am aware of it. :) Porting it to Rust wouldn't produce the same developer experience, unless one wants to see Rc<RefCell<>> and . clone () everywhere.
  - drran 6y ago
    It can be implemented as background UI thread, with message passing.

GekkePrutser 6y ago

Interesting, I will try it! But it will have to be pretty good to replace mc for me. It's not that mc is very good, because it's not. It's just that its keystrokes are deeply ingrained in my muscle memory :) But this looks good and quicker to use (navigating the menu in mc takes a lot of keystrokes)

sayanarijit 6y ago
You should be able to configure the key bindings like mc https://github.com/sayanarijit/xplr/wiki/Key-Bindings https://github.com/sayanarijit/xplr/wiki/Key-Bindings

resoluteteeth 6y ago

I like it, but just having it open and doing nothing with it, it has extremely high cpu usage.

hundchenkatze 6y ago
Same here, it's maxing out 3 cores for me.
- sayanarijit 6y ago
  I'll start working on it shortly. https://github.com/sayanarijit/xplr/issues/10 https://github.com/sayanarijit/xplr/issues/10
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- sayanarijit 6y ago
  Fixed here https://github.com/sayanarijit/xplr/releases/tag/v0.3.3 https://github.com/sayanarijit/xplr/releases/tag/v0.3.3
  - hundchenkatze 6y ago
    Excellent! Thank You!
codychan 6y ago
Same here, I just play with it around 30s before I notice CPU problem.

shomyo 6y ago

'written in rust' is new 'Tips Fedora'

smusamashah 6y ago

There is also broot https://dystroy.org/broot/ https://dystroy.org/broot/

sayanarijit 6y ago
Listed https://github.com/sayanarijit/xplr/wiki/Alternatives https://github.com/sayanarijit/xplr/wiki/Alternatives