This did send me down a rabbit hole, and I ended up installing nnn (n³), only then to land on their GitHub page and staring at the keyboard layout and testing stuff out in the terminal. It is interesting and I wonder how it's getting used.
Superfile – A fancy, pretty terminal file manager
91–100 of 219 posts
Re: Superfile – A fancy, pretty terminal file manager
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Because terminal programs have limitations that limit the amount of annoying things programs can do. The color scheme matches the color scheme I set. They cannot change the font size nor the the font. They cannot spawn windows that will steal focus. They can run inside tmux which has advantages for my workflow. Hotkeys are a first class citizen and not an afterthought when it comes to terminal uis. That being said, I…
It's also usually inherently composable, since you can pipe and redirect and everything speaks a common language (plaintext, for better and worse). If you just naively implement a cli tool, you usually end up with something that can reasonably be chained or redirect into/out of or combined with xargs etc.
It's like if every single GUI program included easy recording of macros and had built-in tools for munging of data to input fields and from text information.
There is a really solid place for GUI tools though and that's where the task is inherently visual (nontrivial tabular data, anything with images or video, etc) or where discovering your features and guiding people through a workflow is more important than it playing a part in a text processing pipeline.
Honestly, file managers are probably a good example of something that really ought to be a GUI and I've always considered it a bit zealous of people to want a TUI for it. Just look at this thread alone - people accidentally deleting files because navigation and actions are so undiscoverable that if you don't just blindly copy vim, even highly technical people will have no idea how to use your tool.
Re: Superfile – A fancy, pretty terminal file manager
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Because terminal programs have limitations that limit the amount of annoying things programs can do. The color scheme matches the color scheme I set. They cannot change the font size nor the the font. They cannot spawn windows that will steal focus. They can run inside tmux which has advantages for my workflow. Hotkeys are a first class citizen and not an afterthought when it comes to terminal uis. That being said, I…
Not just that, there's also that you can run them via SSH, there aren't a zillion top heavy GUI frameworks, interaction is significantly less cumbersome, and let's face it, they look so much better.
For me, hotkeys are the main selling point. I don't want to operate my machine with one wrist and one finger. I have a panel of switches in front of me, why should it be a typewriter 100% of the time? Moving to keyboard focused interaction, particularly vim keys but anything really, it makes me feel like in operating my machine with my mind, it is orders of magnitude less cumbersome once you're past the learning curve, such that when I have to use a traditional stacking, mouse focused environment I feel like I'm on a dial up connection with my hands amputated and cataracts.
Re: Superfile – A fancy, pretty terminal file manager
#94If didn't read the docs, noticed hkjl moved around, and accidentally deleted 3 folders with ctrl+d seeing if I could scroll down faster. Scary defaults if you have Vim muscle memory.
It really weirds me out how many people use a sprinkling of vim keybindings but don't use more. Like how many vim users don't know (esc) or contextual completion like (:help ins-completion). I see so many people use plugins for things that already exist in vim but people never discuss. One that bites me a lot is when a vim keybinding is implemented, has insert mode, and they don't also rebind . Go from trying to dele…
This is my biggest complaint with keybindings on Linux/Windows, that Ctrl means “escape codes” in terminal emulator applications and “window/UI operations” in every other application.
By contrast, in macOS all the window/UI keybindings are typically Cmd (Cmd-W) which means that GUI applications attempting to layer on vi keybindings don’t have to also audit all the Ctrl keybindings that might be doing something wildly different compared to what vi users expect.
Cmd for UI and Ctrl for terminal just makes for such a nice default convention.
Re: Superfile – A fancy, pretty terminal file manager
#95Re: Superfile – A fancy, pretty terminal file manager
#96Love all the terminal tooling that's come out in recent years. I'm this close to chrome and rofi being the only gui I'm using on my work machine. This looks great!
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I'm actually upvoting you. Not because I agree, but because this sentiment is so pervasive I need that responses highlighted instead of buried.
Linux users don't hate GUIs. I say this as someone who's used Linux as a daily driver for 15 years! GUIs have their place, but they aren't for everything. There's are two main issues here
1) The terminal is far more flexible and lightweight. I can do so much more in my terminal and get far more done in less time by using the terminal. Learning a little bash can greatly increase your productivity. And on top of that, I can do this with little cost to resources. I live in the terminal not because it is pretty but because it's faster and more efficient. Yes, there's a learning curve but it pays dividends.
2) customization. Don't confuse this for aesthetics. Those do matter but you should see yourself as an expert craftsman. Your carpenter, engineer, etc all build tools, jigs, and other things to help them, especially with organization. Like them you should create the best environment for you. I know you were told I'm programming classes that the magic is to not keep writing the same lines but to wrap those up. This is the same thing. The aesthetics are so I can see the things I care about the most, not because it's pretty. The aliases and scripts I built are to prevent me from wasting time relooking up things I do intermittently but not frequent enough to memorize. Customization is incredibly hard in GUIs. Dragging and dropping things and half the time the whole fucking screen scrolls because it's hard to not do this. And even then, it gets corrected cluttered and you end up with this long tree of menues. But wait you say, just give it a macro! And at that point, what's the difference? In the terminal we recognize something fundamental: to know it's name is to have power over it.
Yes, this isn't everyone. Every person is on a different part of their journey. And like I said, the customization is about making you productive not trying to find the most optimal, because that idea is laughable. There are good defaults but optimal is personal.
This is why I'll always trust someone more when they live in the terminal. The GUI person might be faster at times but they're limited. The person who will fuck around and find out is the person who will eventually understand more about the complex things they work on. They're more likely to dig deep. And this is the thing silicon valley has lost, the sense of creating what can be, not what is, not someone else's vision but yours.
Re: Superfile – A fancy, pretty terminal file manager
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
It really weirds me out how many people use a sprinkling of vim keybindings but don't use more. Like how many vim users don't know (esc) or contextual completion like (:help ins-completion). I see so many people use plugins for things that already exist in vim but people never discuss. One that bites me a lot is when a vim keybinding is implemented, has insert mode, and they don't also rebind . Go from trying to dele…
This is my biggest complaint with keybindings on Linux/Windows, that Ctrl means “escape codes” in terminal emulator applications and “window/UI operations” in every other application. By contrast, in macOS all the window/UI keybindings are typically Cmd (Cmd-W) which means that GUI applications attempting to layer on vi keybindings don’t have to also audit all the Ctrl keybindings that might be doing something wildly…
I agree— having switched back to Windows five years ago, this is one of the biggest things I miss about the Mac hardware. Having a separate key just avoids the whole drama around whether Ctrl-C is "copy the thing" or "shut it all down", and which of those functions is going to get remapped to Ctrl-Shift-C and all the fallout from that.
Re: Superfile – A fancy, pretty terminal file manager
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
It really weirds me out how many people use a sprinkling of vim keybindings but don't use more. Like how many vim users don't know (esc) or contextual completion like (:help ins-completion). I see so many people use plugins for things that already exist in vim but people never discuss. One that bites me a lot is when a vim keybinding is implemented, has insert mode, and they don't also rebind . Go from trying to dele…
This is my biggest complaint with keybindings on Linux/Windows, that Ctrl means “escape codes” in terminal emulator applications and “window/UI operations” in every other application. By contrast, in macOS all the window/UI keybindings are typically Cmd (Cmd-W) which means that GUI applications attempting to layer on vi keybindings don’t have to also audit all the Ctrl keybindings that might be doing something wildly…
Configurable windows managers on Linux let you code a “super” key. I like the Window key, since it serves no other purpose, and never overlaps with default bindings on Linux.
So the Cmd/Ctrl split on Mac maps nicely to the Win/Ctrl split on Linux.
Re: Superfile – A fancy, pretty terminal file manager
#99so I don't understand what the usecase for a terminal file manager is. I've always felt comfortable using cp/mv/mkdir/etc. but I feel like I'm missing out. Can someone explain how and why you'd use this ?
Re: Superfile – A fancy, pretty terminal file manager
#100Love all the terminal tooling that's come out in recent years. I'm this close to chrome and rofi being the only gui I'm using on my work machine. This looks great!
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Even on HN there's no nuance anymore.
I suspect most Linux users don't "hate GUIs" but hate the garbage that GUIs enable, like pointless/stupid transition animations, hard to see flat UIs, dumbing down of preference/setting dialogs, etc.
Most GUI design is focused on dumbing things down for first time and beginner users, and most Linux users don't fall into that demographic.
If a GUI helps me get my work done faster then I'm all for it. If the GUI gets in my way and wastes my time then I'm not going to use it.