I just installed the cnurses MOC for music in console and happened upon using a file manager in terminal, too. good timing. If it has better search abilities than Thunar, that would be amazing. Probably requires my learning regex, though (ugh).
learning regex is a wonderful epiphany though, once you DO get there!!! it’s always a good tool to have at your side.
Learning the top 10 is on my long ‘to do’ list.
the keybindings…I wish FOSS would settle on standard keybindings. I have no time or energy to learn a new set of keybinding for every dang program I try out. I didn’t read anything in that article that made me think these programs had magical skills for finding files with scant info. Both MarkText (FOSS) and Obsidian (proprietary) can do that.
Alternatively, I wish more programs would offer editable keybindings
Almost all foss program does
Another one worth mentioning is lf. It is a minimal clone of ranger written in Go, and is much faster—especially on slower systems like little SBCs.
I honestly do not understand terminal file managers, what’s their appeal, how are they better than what my command line already offers to me? I am not trying to dismiss them, I just plain do not understand how they are useful to people.
For me, it’s quicker if I don’t remember the exact file name or location. Just see a list, enter a dir, repeat. Instead of typing ls and cd, it’s hjkl movement
I’ve used both ranger and nnn fairly extensively, but I remember wondering the same thing before I tried out terminal file managers seriously. I think they are easier to use and more versatile. With a few key strokes you can perform bulk actions on a large number of files in various locations. You can run arbitrary commands on a selection of files, and define your own functionality fairly easily. Plus, if you ever work in a non-graphical environment, like on a remote server, then they are very nifty to have in your toolbelt.
Thanks for sharing, ranger is very interesting one.
when I was reading a bit about ncurses, a few guys mentioned ranger, but no one mentioned the other one.
I’ve used it for a while. Not sure how nnn compares, but it works well for me. Can set it up to render images with w3c, open PDFs in stuff like Zathura, etc.
