Live data from Hacker News

Superfile – A fancy, pretty terminal file manager

github.com

181–190 of 219 posts

Re: Superfile – A fancy, pretty terminal file manager

#181
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of the new tooling is in Go, superfile included. Noticed this after I started using LazyGit (incredible tool btw, I can't go back to anything else even after being a die hard Magit user for years) There's some stellar libraries in Go for terminal stuff, in particular anything from charmcli. They have an elm style TUI framework called bubbletea (which superfile uses), a styling library, prebuilt components, it's…

They are VC backed now which makes me wonder if they will do a license switch later or something else to monetize... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38126060

I don't know about Charm so maybe someone can check their Github, but there's a dark pattern where you market yourself as open source but not all your components are actually released to the public, so you have a nice GitHub icon on your front page that just leads to silly minor extensions but not the main software. ObsidianMD does it.

Re: Superfile – A fancy, pretty terminal file manager

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nerd Fonts contain glyphs that allow things like the git strip you see at the bottom of code editors ("powerline"), along with ligatures (e.g. if you type https://www.nerdfonts.com/ And here's an example of ligatures (see the image on the right - you type what's on the left, and the right image is what shows in your editor): https://hilton.org.uk/blog/fira-code I think but am not sure as I haven't looked in a while,…

Are there any terminals that ship with nerd fonts, or is it always something that has to be at the OS level? Is there any technical reason the font can't be shipped in the binary and installed automatically?

There's no technical reason the font couldn't be shipped in/with the binary. The main reasons this doesn't happen are probably:

- this is what a package manager is for

- installing the font/s (from the application?) would be a bit of a dick move and also presents a technical challenge (in other words: that's what a package manager is for)

- concerns about the efficiency of many applications all shipping duplicate assets (package manager again)

- concerns about distribution rights

- not all users will want to use the same font and this is an unsolvable problem -- do you ship: no fonts | one unwanted font | the user's preferred font that they already have installed plus all the other user's fonts

Re: Superfile – A fancy, pretty terminal file manager

#183
post #94

Earlier 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…

When you use EXWM (Emacs X Window Manager), this is actually a blessing! It means you can bind Super keys only in Emacs and have them do exactly the same thing every time, while the other X apps (terminals, browsers...) get the Control key to themselves.

Re: Superfile – A fancy, pretty terminal file manager

#184
post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any technical reason the font can't be shipped in the binary and installed automatically?

Which font? What license? Which one does the user want? Where does it get installed? Will the user consent? I did not use a Nerd Font until I tried superfile out today. It was not hard to build my own nerd font version of Berkeley Mono with font forge.

Besides, you still have to set your terminal to use that font. Not as if typing `spf` on the command line can reconfigure whichever terminal you are on.

Re: Superfile – A fancy, pretty terminal file manager

#185
post #110

The first thing this app does is connect to Microsoft servers to download theme files, which for some reason aren't bundled into the binary. If you block it from accessing the internet, it crashes.

Hey thanks for your feedback I just update it to make it a optional! Now you can by typing command to download all themes.

Re: Superfile – A fancy, pretty terminal file manager

#186

It appears to require network access. A file manager should not be dialing anything, especially not on startup. Error downloading theme: Get "https://github.com/MHNightCat/superfile/raw/main/themeZip/v1.1.2/theme.zip": dial tcp: lookup github.com on 8.8.8.8:53: dial udp 8.8.8.8:53: connect: network is unreachable

Hey thanks for your feedback I just update it to make it a optional! Now you can by typing command to download all themes.

Re: Superfile – A fancy, pretty terminal file manager

#187
post #110

The first thing this app does is connect to Microsoft servers to download theme files, which for some reason aren't bundled into the binary. If you block it from accessing the internet, it crashes.

That's pretty bad for a terminal utility and file manager. The thing should never, ever connect to the internet for anything unless explicitly told to by the user. I didn't notice this, thanks for pointing it out.

Why is that the standard for a terminal utility and not GUI software? Why do we accept GUI software that does update checks and phone-home telemetry without configuration or consent?

I’m really curious about this, not to derail the thread.

Re: Superfile – A fancy, pretty terminal file manager

#188

so 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 ?

Three advantages I realized, having done a lot of cd/ls/cp/mv/rm and also having used a file manager: - power user workflows may differ from typical dev workflows. Imagine things that a point-and-click file manager solves quicker than the command-line. Example: manually organizing a bunch of .mp3s, or cleaning out misc downloads. A TUI file manager makes these tasks quicker too. - quick directory navigation. cd is sl…

Hardly speed or UX. Type a quick command on the CLI yo do any of that stuff and it's finished before you can even use you arrow keys to move between various regions of the screen and move your eyes around the work area to confirm everything and select your actions and move your gaze again to confirm the result is what you expect.

It's all about what you're used to and what you know. If you grew up in the age of the point-and-click GUI you might feel more comfortable using visual metaphors and stateful UIs for your intended actions. Others prefer to issue orders and have them obeyed without the song, dance, and lightshow.

Re: Superfile – A fancy, pretty terminal file manager

#189
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are talking about backward compatibility, the parent thread is about forward compatibility. You won't have much luck running a modern executable on XP unless the vendor went out of their way to make that happen. > What's worse is that you can't even really statically link it without herculean effort. The program we are discussing happens to be written in Go so it's trivial to build a statically linked executable.

Are you sure you want glibc statically linked into your go executable ?

glibc won't be used at all.

With Go on Linux libc is only needed when the libc DNS resolver is used (instead of Go's built-in one) or if C libraries are used. superfile doesn't need either of these so it's very simple to build it as a pure Go executable which will be statically linked and contain no C code at all.

Re: Superfile – A fancy, pretty terminal file manager

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are VC backed now which makes me wonder if they will do a license switch later or something else to monetize... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38126060

I don't know about Charm so maybe someone can check their Github, but there's a dark pattern where you market yourself as open source but not all your components are actually released to the public, so you have a nice GitHub icon on your front page that just leads to silly minor extensions but not the main software. ObsidianMD does it.

Where does Obsidian claim they’re open source? Where have they ever done that? And no, having a GitHub icon does not magically announce to the world “we are open source”.

In fact, their license page makes it abundantly clear they are not open source:

> We own and reserve rights to our content, including text, images, and code in the app, which is protected by copyright and other laws.

https://obsidian.md/license

I get this argument if a company or product claimed it was open source and it wasn’t, but it just doesn’t work if the product in question makes it quite clear they are not, or even leaves it ambiguous.

Post reply on HN