Show HN: Nnn – unorthodox terminal file manager (opens in new tab)

Try to think of it as an endless ls-cd loop with tons of automated functionality few keypresses away. Also, please try the type-to-nav mode in nnn.

Also, find/fzf etc. are useful as long as you are not on a slow disk and a mid-range Android device/the Pi. If you are saying you are OK with scanning the whole filesystem every time you are looking for something that can be anywhere under /, I simply don't prefer that.

Find has a pretty poor API in my opinion. Replacing it with fd is a simply improvement similar to ripgrep over grep.

Separately, I have a bunch of keybindings to load sets of files into fzf for easy access. Things like modified files, files changed in current branch, branches modified in the past six weeks. All of these have make working for a large code base much easier for me with little downside except have to piece them together on a new machine.

I like using terminal file managers for quickly traversing many nested directories, where I'm not sure where I want to go. I can use it to browse around and hjkl is familiar as a vim user.

With ranger[0], I can even use it as an alternative to cd, which is often the most convenient (I usually want a terminal in the last directory I browsed to, not the place where I opened the file manager[1]).

I hope to find a way to use nnn similarly, but it (like ranger) doesn't seem to support this out of the box.

[0]: https://github.com/ranger/ranger

[1]: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/342064/ranger-cd-in...

I use them because they fit better in my workflow. I use a tiling WM and vim bindings everywhere I can because keyboards hurt my hands less than mice. I use them just for discovery, if I know what I want mv / cp / find are better. tree doesn't work so well if you have a sub-directory with hundreds of object files, etc.

In my life I’ve occasionally used emacs dired-mode[0] to do medium-sized file operations; more than just 1 or 2 files, but not worth building a script w heuristics.

[0] https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/DiredMode

They can be handy if you're in the middle of something else, and you need one without distraction.

I don't personally use them, but I live in emacs for many hours a day so I do use its integrated directory-manager (dired) to perform simple operations.

My main use nowadays is to select files. i.e. I have a folder with many files, and I need to cp or mv some of them elsewhere. If it's more than a handful tab completing them is a chore, so I run "mc".

A gui doesn't help, because usually I'm on a remote server somewhere (using SSH).

Take a look at Ranger. Ranger gives you the ability to do things like bulk edit files within a vim editor. Try doing this on the cli with the same efficiency and speed. This is where a term file manager really begins to shine...

Sometimes a GUI is faster for me, especially when I'm not 100% sure where things are or there are many files to select.

A terminal file manager has a GUI that works everywhere, including over SSH sessions (OK, technically could use X forwarding, but it's slow).

Exactly. I don't understand what these grant me in terms of flexibility and workflow that bash + shell scripts do ?

Can someone who uses these tools explain ?

I can't speak to any of the others but Midnight Commander is the best and best maintained of the two-panel (orthodox) file managers.

Fewer keystrokes.

Thanks for voicing what I've been feeling. I've just never got any kind of file browser in the terminal. As you said, there are better tools for browsing that require less investment in a partiuclar way of thinking.

Have you ever played with Magit? It’s an emacs front end for git that is utterly amazing. Works great with evil-mode if you prefer vim bindings.

Not really unorthodox, but I have been really liking SublimeMerge on linux. I know MacOS is Win have a few nice GUI clients but non support linux.

https://www.sublimemerge.com/

tig might be something like that: https://jonas.github.io/tig/

There are so many of them! GitHub, for example. ;)

You are looking for the benchmarks: https://github.com/jarun/nnn/pull/84

Don't know what the situation is like today, but not so long ago not all architectures supported floating point numbers. Math operations were emulated in software libraries, which was slow and buggy.

The funny thing about nnn is that the maintainer is absurdly responsive to the point that whenever I didn't like something, rather than configuring it, I would complain and after some consensus from fellow complainers it would get changed in a commit which I immediately enjoyed since I use nnn-git from the AUR.

I feel like I configure nnn via github issues xD

Yes, that's the stand from the beginning and there are good reasons behind that. If you read the issue thread, we did spend a good amount of time discussing those keybinds and most users find them reasonable. Speaking of compiling, the only mandatory library dependency is ncurses and the users don't consider it a significant problem. For example, Arch Linux users install most software from source using formulas and so do Homebrew users. So the tools to build are already present on the system.

nnn also has an option to make the process simpler. Additional details - https://github.com/jarun/nnn/wiki/Advanced-use-cases#custom-...

> May I ask why are you not trying to leverage the assortment of useful tools you wrote with sizeable following to be some kind of side income?

I started contributing to open source because I learn a lot from it since my graduation days. I think of it as a payback to the community. Having said that - I do appreciate users donating now and then. :)

> This was partly inspired by the 'to spend more time with his kid than at a computer' quote.

My regular job is a demanding one. So I have to work smart to save time for my kid and family. Some of the utilities were written to help with that.

> Do you have a rough idea about the number of actual users, other than github stars?

Not really. But I know for sure even some orgs use some of my utilities.

> I did not want to learn a new set of keystrokes.

You don't really need to learn too many new keystrokes for the set of functionality you get in ranger. Many of them are same too.

Thanks for the suggestion. That is my one gripe with Ranger. It can be sluggish at times...

Check out the config var `NNN_OPENER` and program option `-e`.

Please read the first sentence in the project readme.

Thank you for the appreciation! The full feature list is not hidden, it's below because it got way too long (who would have thought?). The toggled one is a quick peek into some of the cool things users can do with nnn.

Yes, that's a good file manager too! Especially for people familiar with vim.

You'll enjoy it for sure!

> lots of extra features

https://github.com/jarun/nnn#features