Re: [dev] ideas on suckless file manager

On Tue, Jun 07, 2011 at 04:25:40PM +0100, Connor Lane Smith wrote:
> With the exception of image thumbnails, icons are really completely pointless.
>
+1

> My thoughts on a suckless file manager, though my file manager is 'ls':
>
> Orthodox: two paned, plus command line. At compile time you just
> define commands like,
> { CTRL('m'), "mv $+ $@" }
> You select a bunch of files on the left, navigate to a directory on
> the left, and hit C-m. Simple, effective. It's not amazing, but it
> would do its job.
>
Can of worms. There's always another damn command, or another archive
format. And the user must learn what is essentially another shell.

I was looking for a tolerable file manager for a long time, and found
nothing fast and simple enough - lfm was closest. I realized that
from the shell, all I (occaisionally) miss in an fm is the ability to
quickly select an arbitrary group of files to operate on. Not scriptable
/ machine stuff like
    mv chapter-[0-9][0-9].pdf dest/
but human stuff like
    mv chapter-02.pdf chapter-16.pdf appendix.pdf dest/
Obviously tab-completion makes that quick and easy, but for longer lists my
non-fm solution is a little tedious:
    ls >listing && vim listing && mv `cat listing` dest

So a suckless file manager would maybe throw away the whole file manager
concept and have a sort of dmenu-like multiple file selector? I suppose
zenity could do this, but it's hardly suckless.

Proposed man page snippets:
NAME
    sfm -- suckless file manager

SYNOPSIS
    sfm [-av] [directory]

DESCRIPTION
    sfm pops up a dmenu-like selector where multiple filenames can be
    selected and printed to standard out. Click or tab selects, Esc
    cancels, return submits.

    By default sfm shows the current directory and does not show
    dotfiles.

Example of use would be:
mv `sfm` dest_dir/

--Noah
Received on Wed Jun 08 2011 - 06:03:06 CEST