Broot – A new way to see and navigate directory trees

https://dystroy.org/broot/

by gilad • 7 years ago

1448 287 7 years ago

dystroy.org

kovek• 7 years ago

This is awesome!! I read through all the features and I can’t wait to try it tomorrow when I get behind my terminal.

wedn3sday• 7 years ago

This seems like a huge step up from tree, I'm definitely giving this a chance.

greenn• 7 years ago

This somewhat reminds of a tool I’ve been working on at https://github.com/digicannon/peek. Looks like this is further along it’s goals, though.

6510• 7 years ago

You need a new idea! I suggest making a brown tree shaped tree with shades of green for the leaves and a monkey to navigate it using a controller. Brown leaves for deleted files. The monkey shakes the tree and you catch the leaves you want to keep. It can also chew off branches.

dwrodri• 7 years ago

pro-tip: I think a lot of people would really appreciate it if you put a quick blurb about installation at the top of the GitHub README and on Broot's landing page. It took me about 30 or so seconds to find the installation page, which gave me enough time to think that this was still new enough that you don't want to hand it out like crazy yet.

Those of us who like to charge in to CLI tools all guns-blazing-like would appreciate it. Also, it would immediately communicate that the project is written in Rust, which some people may like.

dystroy30• 7 years ago

Author here: thanks for the tip. I'll do that. edit: done.

Note that broot is far from new and is reliable on linux. I used it daily in the past 10 months. The only thing which prevented me from tagging it 1.0 is the rough edges on Windows.

stinos3• 7 years ago

rough edges on Windows

This could use some documentation imo. Like the essentials of what 'supported on Win10+' means (is it supported in powershell, or command prompt or bash running on msys or ... ?) and how to laucnh/install it. I only looked briefly, ran broot in cmd but the only thing I get out of broot is that it creates a file <AppData>\Roaming\dystroy\broot\data\launcher\bash\1 and a link (even when entering 'n' instead of 'Y' when it asks to install!!). So I figured it maybe needs to find a 'br' command and added a function 'br' in powershell and launched that, but it still says it's not installed.

asmosoinio• 7 years ago

As a Mac and brew user I would have needed to see "brew install broot" somewhere - since there is no Mac binary I was not sure how to test this until I looked at the comments here.

I am not sure if you have something to do with the "brew" installer for this on MacOS? Or does someone else create that?

Anyways, looks awesome, I think I'll use this at least for listing files by size.

mhandley• 7 years ago

broot looks really useful - thanks! One comment: on the configuration web page, it states:

"The easiest way to read and edit broot's configuration file is to go the help screen (using ?) then to type :open."

When I do that, I get "verb not found: "open"". Not quite sure what is supposed to happen here. I found the config file and editted it manually, but was some magic supposed to happen with the "open" verb?

dod9er2• 7 years ago

Hmm, looks nice, maybe its time to kick my old (ls,less,vi) workflow :) Btw, anyone using this with another pager for fast source-code viewing ?

TsiCClawOfLight• 7 years ago

Agreed, but I don't see a use-case for it given that we have ranger[1]. I find the two-pane navigation + embedded preview + easy opening of files when moving into them to be a perfect combination.

Given your workflow, you might want to give ranger a try?

[1] https://ranger.github.io/

sullyj3• 7 years ago

bat is another nice rust utility, a kind of combination of cat and less with line numbers and colors. If there's more than a screenfull of text it acts as a pager, otherwise like cat.

NetOpWibby4• 7 years ago

Can I install this with brew? I’m currently using exa in place of ls but broot looks neat too.

kevinastone• 7 years ago

https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/broot

NetOpWibby4• 7 years ago

Ah, thanks!

cujo• 7 years ago

"brew search broot" is a lot fewer characters than your question!

NetOpWibby4• 7 years ago

I never knew this was a thing, wow!

halayli• 7 years ago

i am still waiting for someone to replicate xtgold... but then I realize the generations gap and how it might never resurface again.

akho• 7 years ago

https://www.han.de/~werner/ytree.html

I don’t know if it’s faithful enough for you

aepiepaey• 7 years ago

In addition to the one mentioned by a sibling comment, there are several others:

Windows:

- http://textmode.netne.net/Extreme.html

- http://www.ztree.com/

Unix:

- http://www.unixtree.org/

ComodoHacker• 7 years ago

Isn't it what file managers like mc are for?

eps2• 7 years ago

They aren't quite there yet. Still need to realize that having 2 panels side-by-side would eliminate any need for typing when copying and moving stuff around.

Also an XTree-like info panels around the tree itself would help tidying the layout and increasing info density.

All new is a well-forgotten old.

Erlich_Bachman• 7 years ago

What are you talking about, mc has two panels by default?

Narishma• 7 years ago

Who's 'they'? I think mc has all the stuff you're talking about.

aargh_aargh• 7 years ago

I tried it and think I'll keep using it mainly for the "See what takes space" mode (I haven't encountered an alternative that works in terminal, but I haven't looked, either).

PetahNZ• 7 years ago

du -d 1 -h | sort -h

OskarS• 7 years ago

Remove the "-d 1" and that command gets even more useful. This is my preferred version of that trick:

   du -h | sort -hr | less

Phelinofist• 7 years ago

I use NCDU: https://dev.yorhel.nl/ncdu

ekianjo• 7 years ago

Ncdu is very good as well. But little known.

andy_boot• 7 years ago

That's why I wrote this: https://github.com/bootandy/dust Because it was frustrating to track down what had used disk space.

pdimitar10• 7 years ago

I listed two other Rust tools I found very useful for this purpose here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22007350

zlynx2• 7 years ago

There is always "du | sort -nr | head"

bestest• 7 years ago

very nice!

but does anyone has an idea if there is a way to customise file sorting?

dystroy30• 7 years ago

Not now. Sorting isn't really compatible with the tree view idea.

There's the "fat whales spotting" mode, which only displays one level and sorts by size, though, and I plan to extend this mode to other sortings.

colordrops• 7 years ago

Can someone make this work like fzf so we can embed it in vim for ctrl-p style plugins? That would be amazing.

dystroy30• 7 years ago

Using it to replace ctrl-p in vim is something I think a lot about those days. I guess I'll have to do it.

jtms• 7 years ago

Yes! "I would love this for Vim" was the very first thing I thought when I saw this.

modeless• 7 years ago

Looks cool! You should record some demos with https://asciinema.org/

dystroy30• 7 years ago

I did in the past but the problem of asccinema for applications like vi or broot is that people don't really understand: you hit two or three keys and the stuff is magically done.

rmetzler• 7 years ago

If seen YouTube videos with an overlay of key presses. Unfortunately I’m not sure how to record something like this.

iicc• 7 years ago

asciinema has a --stdin option to record keypresses - https://discourse.asciinema.org/t/does-asciinema-record-the-...

The bit that's not done yet is rendering an overlay in the web player - https://github.com/asciinema/asciinema-player/issues/79

sdan• 7 years ago

Not only do I think this is cool and would use, but I also love the simple landing page.

Pictures illustrating exactly what it does, something many people/organizations cough oxide.computer cough don't do properly.

pure-awesome• 7 years ago

Yeah, love this! I hate when I can't figure out what a software or service does from their homepage.

Looking at oxide.computer... man... what DO they do? Do they sell servers?

My other pet peeve for these kind of websites is when the landing page is full of just release notes and links to tangentially related articles news articles and talks about the product, and it takes me 10 minutes to figure out where I can actually read about what the heck product I'm even looking at, and why I would use it over other products in its class.

This XKCD about uni websites gives the general gist of what I'm talking about https://xkcd.com/773/

Some Github repos are also awful. The README should summarize what the product is or link to a website that does.

The Kotlin and Elm websites are pretty good: https://kotlinlang.org/ https://elm-lang.org/

It's hard to find some really terrible ones right now...

Apache products tend to take some effort to decipher what it is they even do or how they'd be used. They have a nice summary description like the start of a man page, but that's about it. https://ant.apache.org/ https://hadoop.apache.org/

The GitHub landing page is surprisingly worse than you'd expect. It's not terrible... but check it out in Incognito / Private Window and imagine you'd never heard of GitHub: https://github.com/

Compare the above, with how cleanly and clearly Travis-CI manages to express what it does, and why you would use them, along with a useful screenshot of what the UI looks like right near the top of the page, so you can get an idea of what it would be like to use in practice: https://travis-ci.org/

bbx• 7 years ago

I was thinking the exact same thing.

I'm not the most technical person but I could easily understand the purpose of the program by quickly scanning the webpage. The combo "clear headline + demo screenshot" is all that's required to explain what the product features are, and how I, as a user, can benefit from this product. There is even a blob of text available under each screenshot, for those who want to know a little bit more. (Reminds of "The obvious, the easy, and the possible" [1])

A lot of landing pages of SaaS products and other tech-related websites could benefit a lot from this "old" but straightforward approach, instead of trying to sell you a better lifestyle with "Be productive" or "Break free" or "Solve all your issues" marketing headlines.

[1] https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3047-the-obvious-the-easy-and...

Royalaid• 7 years ago

I think the reason this happens is because there is a belief that, and who knows maybe it's the truth, people buy emotionally. Business and marketing books (E-myth and How to win friends come to mind specifically) constantly parrot that "sales studies" and "marketing research" show that people buy, or this case download, with their feelings. This seems to lead people to add vacuous fluff to marketing pages to "appeal" to someone's emotions.

As you can tell by most of comment I think this isn't the whole truth and that really things live somewhere in the middle and that the domain and scope of interaction greatly shift this spectrum one way or another, picking a doctor/lawyer vs picking and IDE comes to mind for myself, YMMV with that example and might even further drive home the point.

Long story long, marketing is hard and the people doing the marketing often aren't domain experts and have to rely on the information passed to them through a convoluted game of telephone via authors and experts that can't even communicate everything needed to be effective because they themselves aren't good at teaching.

fastbeef• 7 years ago

Man, I must be getting old, because more and more often something like this pops up and it strikes me that this has been done before.

In this case, I was flying through the file system like nobodies business in 1991 with Norton Commander[0]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norton_Commander

dystroy30• 7 years ago

Did Norton Commander trim the tree in order to show a deeper overview ? I don't think it did (or I don't remember that feature).

smartmic• 7 years ago

Probably the trim feature is a key differentiator. I am happy with nnn [1] so far but it really looks interesting.

[1] https://github.com/jarun/nnn

vetinari3• 7 years ago

Norton Commander could have the directory tree in one pane, and showing files from selected directory in the other pane, where you could scroll them.

koonsolo• 7 years ago

Oh yeah Norton Commander, that brings back memories!

I've also used Total Commander for a while. I haven't seen any directory or file manager that is better.

vetinari3• 7 years ago

I've also used Total Commander for a while. I haven't seen any directory or file manager that is better.

Far Manager is better, of course :)

kmarc• 7 years ago

I assume you all know Midnight Commander (mc) - because of my Norton/Total Commander past, this is still something I always install on my machines (although using it less often)

kronholm• 7 years ago

Once you get used to two panes, it's hard to go back.

From ~1990 to now (yikes, 30 years!), I've used these:

- Amiga: Directory Opus (DOpus)

- MSDOS: Norton Commander (NC)

- Windows: Total Commander

- Linux: Midnight Commander (mc)

- MacOS: Tux commander

Looking back at old Directory Opus screenshots tickles the nostalgic bone. I miss the colourcoded buttons.

I wonder if Directory Opus was the first 2-split navigator, but probably not.

MichaelMoser123• 7 years ago

for the current windows platform there is far manager: https://www.farmanager.com/ Unlike Norton it has plug-ins and there are a lot of them available.

oska• 7 years ago

These types of file-managers are called 'Orthodox file managers'. [1]

In answer to your question of which was the first, the answer appears to be PathMinder (1984) and Norton Commander (1986). Both were for DOS so it seems to be an original innovation from the DOS world. Directory Opus first came out in 1990.

I wasn't familiar with PathMinder before looking at the wikipedia article but I was familiar with Norton Commander, as I think nearly everyone who used DOS in the late 80s would be. I personally favoured XTree (1985) more. Xtree didn't originally have the two pane view, but added it in 1989.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_manager#Orthodox_file_man...

vermaden3• 7 years ago

Try Worker, it is as close to Directory Opus as possible.

https://www.tecmint.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Worker-Fi...

Its available on FreeBSD so it must be available on Linux and macOS at least ... not sure about Windows.

yread• 7 years ago

There were also PC Tools from 1985 which included a shell and other programs.

https://books.google.nl/books?id=ki8EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA34&redir_...

I love how "FORMAT your disk without leaving your spreadsheet" is a feature

joshspankit• 7 years ago

I’ve always found 2 panes to be extremely limiting

makach2• 7 years ago

definitively try macOS MARTA https://marta.yanex.org/ - beautiful file management

hibbelig• 7 years ago

_Once you get used to two panes, it's hard to go back._

Just as a data point, I tried that and I never could figure out how to populate the left pane and the right pane in such a way that it was helpful. (I.e. that copy and move did the right thing.) It just felt pointless to me.

I've used vifm a few times, but only after figuring out how to turn off the two-pane split :-)

De gustibus non disputandem, I guess.

turrini• 7 years ago

"Double Commander (https://doublecmd.sourceforge.io/) is a free cross platform open source file manager with two panels side by side. It is inspired by Total Commander and features some new ideas."

capdeck2• 7 years ago

I can't believe DOS Navigator [1] is not mentioned - true MDI in TUI using Turbo Vision. Ran circles around Norton Commander. Even had a freaking spreadsheet built-in!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS_Navigator

Karrot_Kream• 7 years ago

I'm a big fan of muCommander as well.

yks• 7 years ago

What is the best modern file manager for MacOS? Using ForkLift but it's not Total Commander.

omaranto2• 7 years ago

Fixing the number of panes at 2 seems a little arbitrary. I used dired in emacs and open precisely the number of panes I want: most of the time 1, fairly often 2, once in a blue moon 3, and I've never needed 4.

wruza• 7 years ago

Counter data point here. NC/VC since 90-ish, TC, MC, Far. Then suddenly it all lost fit and explorer/finder felt much better, with many windows and quick access pins. Explorer still lacks Finder’s inplace folder expanding, but that’s bearable.

Idk what happened exactly, but now I can’t stand commanders at all.

jijji• 7 years ago

midnight commander (mc) is the equivalent, but it really looks like ls -R | less

flir4• 7 years ago

Everything's been done before. Social media is just finger/.plan files. The art's in executing better (eg the trim feature here).

peterwwillis• 7 years ago

Occasionally that better execution is overlooked because it looks like just a bunch of features, but a confluence of features often changes the game.

A rope and pulley attached to a vertically-moving platform existed for a really long time, and then someone bolted on a ratchet, and it became an elevator, which (with some iteration, and marketing) gave birth to skyscrapers. Another one is LXC, which existed for 5 years before Docker's confluence of features (and impressive marketing) made it ubiquitous and changed the [backend] tech landscape.

FpUser• 7 years ago

I got exactly the same thought the minute I saw this post. I use Commander clones on all the OSes. To me they're irreplaceable tool.

jhidding• 7 years ago

Would also be cool as a Vim plugin!

skykooler• 7 years ago

Indeed! I'd love to have some way to use broot instead of NERDTree.

seren• 7 years ago

Just a quick remark but for a simple command line utility, I really like a static binary you only need to download, drop into a directory in the path. I am always wary of tools that need to install either a python or node.js distribution, because this seems unnecessary bloat, and might mess with local install if you are not careful.

dystroy30• 7 years ago

You can download binaries from there: https://dystroy.org/broot/documentation/installation/

JosephHatfield• 7 years ago

Strange that Chrome doesn't appear to trust broot.exe. When that binary is downloaded, the downloaded file message is: broot.exe is not commonly downloaded and may be dangerous.

leeman2016• 7 years ago

In addition to Chrome, Windows 10 seems to be suspicious too ... I don't know why though.

progval• 7 years ago

But they only work with a subset of architectures (only x86_64 in this case) and a subset of OSs (Windows with GNU installed, Linux with GNU libraries including libc and libgcc)

swiley• 7 years ago

Linux with GNU

That’s why he said static, although I’m not sure gcc will produce totally static binaries anymore.

roller• 7 years ago

Rust on windows has targets for msvc or gnu. The MSVC integrates better with Visual Studio and other Microsoft libraries for development. One downside I've found is that it dynamically links against a msvcrt DLL. Which means you may need to download and install a Visual C++ Redistributable package to run.

The gnu target seems to be fully static and run everywhere with no dependencies.

TheCabin• 7 years ago

Really cool!

I sometimes find it amazing that we do computer science for decades now, but there is still a lot of room to improve very basic things.

avaku• 7 years ago

I miss my Far Manager, working on Linux now... Just remembering how quickly I was doing stuff in directory structure, people couldn't even follow with their eyes...

vetinari3• 7 years ago

Install mc (midnight commander). It is slightly different, in some ways better, in some ways worse.

fraktl2• 7 years ago

I'm one of those skeptic people who always criticize just because I'm a negative person. However... I LOVE THIS PROGRAM! I really, really, really love it!

I don't care if it's been done before. I don't care if <insert name here> exists and does a similar thing.

Awesome because: - short name (br in terminal, I'll remember that instantly)

- easy installation

- web page is awesome and shows you instantly how to best use this program

- help page in the program itself is awesome, clear and easy to navigate

- defaults are sensible and totally easy to get used to

- broot just WORKS! and it works well, I finally got rid of all the aliases around ls that I used in order to get info I want

Amazing job Denys, 10/10 for the web, program, documentation and examples!

Btw. Linux/Windows user here.

dystroy30• 7 years ago

Wow. Thank you. As an open-source author it really helps to get this kind of comments.

fraktl2• 7 years ago

Open source authors should be getting more "thank you" messages rather than constant barrage of issues and complaints :)

Have an excellent day and successful year!

bpizzi• 7 years ago

Please accepts my sincere congratulations and appreciation for your work on broot too! (Et bonjour de lyonnais à lyonnais pendant qu'on y est!) And I see you work for this french group now, and I'm pretty sure one of my plant management software is deployed at one of their plants - the world is small!

modarts• 7 years ago

Well, here’s another one - this is easily one of the most useful cli tools that I’ve installed in a very long time. This is amazing work!

petre• 7 years ago

Thank you! I really like your program.

yodsanklai2• 7 years ago

what's the easiest way to install it on Mac OS? I don't see mentions of a brew package in the doc.

tomlong• 7 years ago

Looks like rust/cargo but i haven't tried it yet

bnjamin• 7 years ago

brew install broot

then run the broot command and it will prompt you to update your .bashrc or .zshrc file

windexh8er• 7 years ago

There are install instructions for cargo, so it's Rust. Install those prereqs first and then use cargo to install Broot.

ibly31• 7 years ago

I was unable to cagro install it, had a bunch of build errors. Decided to brew install it instead, and although its a major version behind the github release, it works as advertised!

pdimitar10• 7 years ago

Both `brew install broot` and `cargo install broot` work (latter if you have Rust installed, which is just `brew install rust` away).

The homebrew version is quite behind though, it was 0.10.x when I checked earlier today, while the latest version is 0.11.x.

throwaway773844• 7 years ago

I second this. This has replaced nnn for me and solves so many devops headaches. Excellent work!

This should teach anyone that tackling something that's considered "the basics" is not a bad idea. It is astounding how these really simple things can still be enhanced (or even revolutionised ;)) in 2020.

dod9er2• 7 years ago

Could you elaborate which devops headaches got solved ? :)

apjana8• 7 years ago

This has replaced nnn for me and solves so many devops headaches

Can you please elaborate? Is that specifically because nnn[1] doesn't show a complete overview of the filesystem or some other features are missing?

One of the guiding principles of nnn is to generate minimum disk IOs.

Reading through a complete volume on a stuffed microSD or SD card attached to a RaspberryPi to list the filesystem (even if compacted) and then supporting filesystem changes dynamically is resource-intensive. nnn development is driven by minimum resource availability and usage.

[1] https://github.com/jarun/nnn

apjana8• 7 years ago

A new version of nnn is released - https://github.com/jarun/nnn/releases/tag/v2.9

It simplifies a lot of workflows and reduces the number of keys.

lalabert• 7 years ago

Great summary!

This is an awesome piece work. Do a "simple" thing extremely well! Well done

yodsanklai2• 7 years ago

Just installed it. It looks nice. It's great to see that there is room for improvement for the shell commands and utilities we use everyday.

I think a vim mode would be great. The first thing I did was to use 'j' to navigate in the tree.

dystroy30• 7 years ago

The problem with using "j" to go down is that it prevents you from using "j" to filter files having a "j" in their name.

psalminen• 7 years ago

I did the same thing. A vim mode would be a nice addition. To search for j, I think creating an insert mode would be best.

krick3• 7 years ago

Same. It seems like it could be useful, but I'm virtually handicapped after decades of vim mode in a sense I cannot efficiently use any software that doesn't support vim keystrokes (well, nobody really can, they just don't know that).

b0rsuk• 7 years ago

Strongly agree. Keyboard interfaces can be very fast and efficient, but their weakness is having to learn a separate keymap (or set of options) to use a new program.

Vim keys is the closest console programs have to a common language! I seriously think all console programs should use a vim-like keymap. Not Emacs, because Emacs has a completely different philosophy - integrate everything into Emacs. Emacs is the prototype IDE. Emacs doesn't seek to export its keybindings, it seeks to import everything.

p5a0u9l• 7 years ago

I too agree with strength that is strong. Just yesterday I was googling how to get tree to respect my git ignore. The universe heard and responded with broot!

But without first class support for vi navigation, be will end up replacing tree as my directory preview pane in vifm.

VvR-Ox• 7 years ago

+1, I completely agree!

Especially the screenshots help to get motivated to try it and if you try it you will notice it just works as advertised - awesome :-D

ashwinne• 7 years ago

+1 I use a combination of Linux tools all day to achieve this: ls, tree, ranger, ncdu. Thanks so much for writing a tool built primarily for directory exploration. This deserves to ship in Ubuntu ASAP :-)

#1 ask: please add a Vim mode for j/k navigation and / search.

base698• 7 years ago

It's funny that it is called Broot and a bunch of people just downloaded and ran an executable from the internet.

dystroy30• 7 years ago

I am Broot, and root, on so many computers now !

but seriously, how to install from source is clearly shown

fantasicferret• 7 years ago

I can't agree more. I don't understand why other software developers think (or don't care) that it's okay to have tedious installation instructions and or controls. I'm a developer and I want to get my new tool and start playing with it, not spend hours with configuration and setup.

archivist1• 7 years ago

We are broot

j88439h84• 7 years ago

Ranger is another good option for navigating directories.

https://ranger.github.io/

scoopr• 7 years ago

Is it something I'm not understanding or a bug, but alt-enter does the same thing as plain enter? (macos, zsh, iterm2, fi-locale. Installed through cargo, the executable installed the br thing)

dystroy30• 7 years ago

It's not supposed to do the same thing. alt-enter closes vim:

* on a file it opens the file (in the same terminal if possible, depending on the system file opening) * on a directory it does a cd to that directory and comes back to the terminal (if broot was launched with the br command)

I'd like Mac users to chime in and answer you now: I can't really test on mac.

adriang133• 7 years ago

Alt-Enter, or more specifically Option-Enter doesn't work on macOS. It does the same thing as Enter, as pointed out above.

Good job btw, Broot looks awesome!

dancek3• 7 years ago

MacOS Terminal and iTerm users need to configure their terminal to use the Option key properly. You need Option-Enter to output either Esc+Enter or Meta-Enter.

See https://superuser.com/a/496152 for screenshots.

pathsjs2• 7 years ago

I tried, but sometimes I actually need the Alt key to behave like it does by default, to enter modified characters such as ~ (which is not on my keyboard). Any other ways?

friend-monoid• 7 years ago

I like it! It's a bit too slow on my machine, but I really have too many files, I need to clean up some of the crap I have lying around.

Multrex• 7 years ago

How to install on CentOS?

SAI_Peregrinus2• 7 years ago

https://dystroy.org/broot/documentation/installation/

How I did it (though not using CentOS, should be identical):

Install rustup from https://rustup.rs/ (download & run the shell script).

Then `cargo install broot` to download and and install this. Then run `broot`, and restart the shell. After that it can be invoked via the `br` command.

spurgu• 7 years ago

Ooh nice, like ls, tree and du/ncdu wrapped into one.

baq2• 7 years ago

tested with mosh with black-on-white color scheme and it doesn't play nicely with that combo - text it prints is color-on-black; i'd rather have it redraw the whole terminal or (better) keep to the terminal color scheme

dystroy30• 7 years ago

The skin is customizable. There's one that I propose for black-on-white: https://dystroy.org/broot/documentation/configuration/#white...

and I guess people more used to black-and-white could submit a better one

baq2• 7 years ago

thanks for thinking about that! do you think there's a way to identify that the terminal is black-on-white and use something like that by default? i don't really care that much about specifics as long as it can pick one automatically depending on terminal settings.

unishark• 7 years ago

/I/am/Broot

-- I am Broot

rcshubhadeep• 7 years ago

Great work! Thanks a lot. Can we get somekind of "brew" integration for Mac users as well please?

dystroy30• 7 years ago

There's a brew formula, yes. You can do `brew install broot`.

I've been told that the bash file path I use on mac is wrong though: https://github.com/Canop/broot/issues/84

frereubu• 7 years ago

In the meantime you can just add this line to the bottom of .bash_profile after installation:

source /Users/username/Library/Preferences/org.dystroy.broot/launcher/bash/br

Obviously replacing username with your username...

greentrust• 7 years ago

Does your release process include publishing to brew? I ask because brew only has 0.10.3, whereas crates and github show something a few versions ahead (0.11.3). Looks awesome!

luladjiev• 7 years ago

That's one really nice tool. Great job.

Emptysister• 7 years ago

Wow! loving it after using it for the first 5 minutes!

thank you

stevendgarcia• 7 years ago

Loving everything about this. You really knocked it out the park. It's so much more ergonomic than cd + ls (which feels like a caveman solution by comparison) Congrats on bringing directory navigation into the 21st Century. I have installed it on all my servers and I will use it forever. Long live Broot!

stinos3• 7 years ago

Don't want to downplay broot, but fzf has been around for a while and when I first discovered it I had the exact same idea 'YEAH finally directory/file navigation for the 21st century' :) Mainly because of the fuzzy matching, and because of the ways to extend it and because it works on most platforms. Possibly there were already predecessors though, not sure.

pdimitar10• 7 years ago

Another poster mentioned https://github.com/lotabout/skim but I haven't compared it to fzf yet.

bnegreve• 7 years ago

I don't think interactive tools such as broot are meant to replace standard shell commands. Interactive tools are more user-friendly, but classical shell commands are easier to script and pipe together.

vermaden3• 7 years ago

I really liked broot after using it for several minutes.

One of the downsides is that it calculates the space everytime with -s option which makes it slow in that mode.

If you seek for really fast tool for that purpose then try ncdu which calculates the sizes only once at start then then does that only on your request by pressing the 'r' key.

Here is how ncdu looks like:

https://linuxundich.de/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/ncdu-linux...

dystroy30• 7 years ago

The sizes are cached so they should not be recomputed (if you don't hit F5 or don't do any change (like rm, cp, etc.) from broot.

pdimitar10• 7 years ago

If you look for dedicated separate tools that calculate directory sizes then those two (also Rust tools) can help:

1. `cargo install dirstat-rs` (binary is `ds`): Prints several lines showing the size of the directory and the top fattest children. Colored output.

2. `cargo install dua-cli` (binary is `dua`): Only prints one line with the specified directory size. Colored output.

Both are insanely fast (they use all CPU cores). Love them both.

vermaden3• 7 years ago

Thank you, will look into them.

fphilipe• 7 years ago

This looks great!

Only dealbreaker for me unfortunately is that it forces me to use up/down arrows, i.e. leave the home row. I use ctrl+p/n everywhere (or ctrl+j/k in some tools), be it in the terminal or on macOS.

dystroy30• 7 years ago

You can use ctrl-p and ctrl-n. You wouldn't be the first one : https://github.com/Canop/broot/issues/24#issuecomment-572481...

abjKT26nO8• 7 years ago

Judging from the landing page, it seems to be a file manager and not an alternative to tree(1). If so, another one that's also handy and shows you a preview of the files one level up and down the directory tree is ranger(1) --- and it has vim keys which makes it extra great.

istjohn• 7 years ago

Yeah, I just discovered ranger a couple weeks ago. I'm going to see how this compares.

moralsupply2• 7 years ago

Is there a way to make Broot respect the terminal theme's colors? If I have a light theme running, br doesn't care and uses a dark background, and when I run it with --sizes half of the screen has a dark background and the other half is light.

dystroy30• 7 years ago

You can't just respect the terminal colors because the colors you add wouldn't be readable.

Right now the best option is to define the skin in the config file (see https://dystroy.org/broot/documentation/configuration/#white...) and I've added a new issue requesting that broot detects if a white skin seems more suitable.

moralsupply2• 7 years ago

Cheers! Awesome tool btw

JdeBP3• 7 years ago

"respect the terminal theme's colours" generally decodes to "use indexed colour and just the 16 AIXTerm colour indexes", note.

piahoo• 7 years ago

no support for fish shell?

samatman3• 7 years ago

+1; the documentation says fish is supported, but the shell command fails with "I found neither .bashrc nor .zshrc."

Also: might want to fall back to .profile if .bashrc isn't found...

SAI_Peregrinus2• 7 years ago

Works for me. The "Installation" page includes the phrase " (supported shells today are bash, zsh and fish)," for it in the section on the shell function.

dystroy30• 7 years ago

There's one but there was a problem for fish on mac until a few minutes ago...

(I made a new release)

samatman3• 7 years ago

works for me now, thanks!

makach2• 7 years ago

This is great. "brew install broot" worked lovely on my mac

nizmow• 7 years ago

I love it, but it's REALLY slow in Windows on the new MS Terminal, which is typically actually quite fast. Noticeably laggy and I can see the screen redraws. Anyone have any idea why, or how to speed it up?

galacticdessert2• 7 years ago

I also noticed some slowness on Windows, especially in the fuzzy search. Will test later on my private Linux machine for comparison.

Overall though, great tool!

JdeBP3• 7 years ago

In the 1980s, full-screen TUI programs did significant work to optimize terminal output. A complete redraw of an 80 by 24 screen at 300 BPS was not quick. So applications normally only wrote changes to the screen, only performing a full redraw when requested by a Control-L input (or some such).

Terminals have sped up, but the amount of terminal I/O to draw a screen has increased, too. Nowadays there are lengthy SGR 38/48 sequences for 24-bit RGB, plus the other SGR sequences for attributes, plus of course characters that are now commonly multi-byte UTF-8 encodings, including box drawing characters.

So the old considerations of optimizing terminal output still apply nowadays to full-screen TUI applications. Optimize out cursor motions that move to where the cursor currently is; replace absolute motions to nearby positions by shorter relative motion control sequences; optimize out superfluous attribute and colour changes; replace onwards horizontal cursor motions by just rewriting the relevant characters; skip unchanged cells; and so forth.

* https://github.com/jdebp/nosh/blob/79b1c0aab9834a09a59e15d47...

The Rust full-screen TUI code in Broot (and common Rust libraries) does not do any of this.

* https://github.com/Canop/broot/blob/d8ba179946ad10d777f93b4a...

* https://github.com/crossterm-rs/crossterm/blob/41ff73e3d3763...

When it is a Win32 application, it uses console I/O and this does not matter quite as much, although it's still a waste of system call context switches to overwrite a console screen buffer with what is already there. But when it is using terminal I/O this matters significantly.

The Rust terminal handling is actually fairly poor overall. This list, for example, is in reality a lot longer. The terminfo database records a lot more terminal types that understand these escape sequences. "putty" for one egregiously missing example.

* https://github.com/crossterm-rs/crossterm/blob/41ff73e3d3763...

* https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/terminfo.ti.html#tic-pu...

Personally, rather than treat lack of capability as the norm with a paltry list of exceptions, I prefer the opposite assumption that (except for "dumb") the world has nowadays reached 1976 capability levels. (-:

* https://github.com/jdebp/nosh/blob/79b1c0aab9834a09a59e15d47...

OvermindDL1• 7 years ago

Loving it, but it's very slow on refresh on Linux over ssh as well. Looks like it's doing full screen refreshes on every change instead of just using delta's that tui apps should be doing.

gulabjamuns3• 7 years ago

On Mac OS, is there a way so that Enter opens a text file using vim and not xcode.

dystroy30• 7 years ago

If it's only for text files, you should configure the system opening.

If it's for any kind of file, then you can override the Enter: https://dystroy.org/broot/documentation/tricks/#open-files-w...

More usually you define a few shortcuts for your specific needs : https://dystroy.org/broot/documentation/configuration/#verbs...

gulabjamuns3• 7 years ago

I get: Bad configuration: not a valid key: enter

When I put enter as a key in place of F2.

breytex• 7 years ago

Love it. Thanks for sharing.

But I found one issue which might be a critical one:

When you start broot with "br --sizes", it shows you all the folder sizes. The tree than takes a while to render all the different files and folders, since they probably have to be recursively evaluated in size.

However, when you select a specific file, press space and then `rm` to delete it, the pointer might change to another file randomly. This is because the file list is still not rendered-out because of the file sizes beeing calculated, however, the pointer to the selected file should be persistant or you might accidentaly delete an important file.

dystroy30• 7 years ago

There's an issue for that (it's a few hours old). This is a top priority and should be fixed before next week.

ausjke2• 7 years ago

tried it, pretty neat like other useful rust tools: bat, rg, fd, etc. For this one compared to ranger, here is what I feel to make broot even better.

    1. support vim keybindings
    2. support editing text files inside the terminal as ranger does

with a quick try i still feel ranger is better, if I missed something that broot has advantages over ranger please let me know.

capdeck2• 7 years ago

2. support editing text files inside the terminal as ranger does

Can it be configured to just open file in vim or other eidtor? May be in a subshell, so you can return back to broot. Why reinvent the wheel...

ausjke2• 7 years ago

ranger uses vi directly inside the terminal, when you quit vi you are back to ranger in the same terminal. ranger is also .git aware.

on the other hand, grep/find GNU tools all should be upgraded to ignore .git/node_modules/pip-site-packages by default, and honor .gitignore,etc.

adwf• 7 years ago

This is really great! Two things that could do with improvement:

- The backspace key quits the program. I've accidentally quit so many times after deleting my filter by holding the key down.

- The filter seems quite quick at first, but when I add a period it slows down massively. ie. Search for "xorg", then "xorg.conf", the moment you type the period it hangs for a good few seconds, even though it's in the top level of my home folder. A breadth first search should find it trivially, so I'm assuming it's some quirk of the fuzzy matching.

pdimitar10• 7 years ago

The dot is likely treated as an "any character" in a regex type of way.

gulabjamuns3• 7 years ago

On Mac OS, Enter invokes Xcode. How to get it to use vim for text files.

dddddaviddddd• 7 years ago

Probably it's using the default file handler, i.e. whatever would open the file if double-clicked in the Finder.

dystroy30• 7 years ago

By default the standard file opening provided by the system is used but you can override it: https://dystroy.org/broot/documentation/tricks/#open-files-w...

growt• 7 years ago

Can I match directories and file names at the same time?

"frontendaction" will match "frontendaction.txt" but not "frontend/action.txt"

"frontend/action" will turn the search into a regular expression and complain

dystroy30• 7 years ago

There's currently no search on paths, only on filenames.

Sammi• 7 years ago

I had this immediate assumption that this was implemented in Rust when I saw the landing page. Didn't know for sure until I checked Github, but lo and behold it was which I think is funny. I sense a trend where new and interesting projects are usually implemented in Rust.

kvark2• 7 years ago

Was reading and thinking "oh boy this looks so good, I wish it was written in Rust..." and then reached the "Installation Instructions" just to see "cargo install broot". HERE WE GO

drkstr• 7 years ago

Is cargo known for build problems? I've never used it before now and I took a shot in the dark with `sudo apt install cargo`, then `cargo install broot` went off without a hitch. I just had to add ~/.cargo/bin to PATH and I was good to go. This was in WSL no less.

Is this experience atypical? I've actually been running through the getting started guide for rust-lang as it left a positive impression on me. Something like this in C land seems unachievable.

narimiran• 7 years ago

Was reading and thinking "oh boy this looks so good, I wish it was written in Rust..."

Can I ask... why?

What is the difference between a program that makes you feel "oh boy this looks so good" written is some XY language, and the same program with the same functionality written in Rust?

eerrt• 7 years ago

Yeah so many CLI tools in Rust:

https://github.com/sharkdp/fd/ https://github.com/sharkdp/bat https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep https://github.com/ogham/exa

eindiran2• 7 years ago

Here are some more that I've used or seen:

* lsd - https://github.com/Peltoche/lsd

* sk - https://github.com/lotabout/skim

* hx - https://github.com/sitkevij/hex

pdimitar10• 7 years ago

Learned about exa from you and immediately replaced my shell aliases from `ls` to `exa` with flags. Thanks a lot!

xwowsersx2• 7 years ago

Just installed, this is awesome. What is alt-enter on Mac OS? How do I use this to CD into the directory I selected?

xwowsersx2• 7 years ago

I can do :cd but is there a way to make alt-enter work?

djsumdog• 7 years ago

Hmm .. I wish there was an IRC or Gitter chat. If I try to select some files with a regex like /SomeTVSeries(.*)mkv .. it selects everything, but then a space mv and new path only moved the currently selected directory or file.

There is a section in the help about using verbs on a selection, but nothing to indicate how to turn a regex search into a multiple file selection (can't tell if this is supported or not) ... I guess if it's not it would be a neat thing to see if I could add.

Edit: there is a chat room! https://miaou.dystroy.org/3490?broot

getsauce• 7 years ago

Was anyone able to make this work in WSL? I can run the broot binary if I specify the path to it, but even after running the install script, trying to use br doesn't work.

nicpottier• 7 years ago

Looks pretty neat. Would REALLY like CTRL-P and CTRL-N to work for up/down as is standard in OS X / most linux systems.

dystroy30• 7 years ago

You can very easily configure broot : https://github.com/Canop/broot/issues/24#issuecomment-572481...

aiisjustanif• 7 years ago

I'm surprised no one has brought up the weight of the node modules on the system in the last section on their site, "See what takes space:"

It's quite beefy for such a tool.

ojosilva• 7 years ago

I wish the Github UI had an user experience like this. I do a lot of directory tree navigation in the GH interface these days, while searching for algorithms and examples for a new project and it's horrible how much time I'm wasting on clicking into and stepping back out of folders trying to get a glimpse of whats in them. The lack of file sizes and filetype icons make it even worse. GH file navigation feels like a step back from where we already were in 1986 with Norton Commander.

gringoDan• 7 years ago

While not exactly the solution you're looking for, I've found that Octotree is a useful tool for navigating GitHub: https://github.com/ovity/octotree

galacticdessert2• 7 years ago

+1. Would be nice to have something similar for gitlab as well.

Jarred• 7 years ago

You might already know about this, but try pressing T.

almindor• 7 years ago

Really cool. For some reason when I opened the webpage I was like "this seems like it's written in Rust" and it is! I'm using Rust as my main language for the past 6 months now so it makes me happy :D

mpawelski• 7 years ago

Looks like really cool and useful project. Is it usable on Windows though? I can't press Shift key to enter ":" for commands. Seems like a dealbreaker. I tested it on WSL and Ubuntu on VM and Shift works there.

Anyway. This look super cool. I'm a Windows guy but have been using terminal more lately with tools like https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep https://github.com/sharkdp/bat https://github.com/sharkdp/fd and they work great on Windows (plus are easily installable by https://scoop.sh/). Hope the Windows story will improve for Broot to.

Some suggestions after very quick look (except not working Shift key on Windows).

* Screen refreshing and general experience is really slow. Hold arrow key for couple of seconds and see that refreshing can't catch up. The best performance is on standard windows cmd, a bit worse on new "Windows Terminal (Preview)", absolutely horrible on ConEmu (which I use daily :-( )

* I sort of expected that I can "scroll" current directory but I get "400 unlisted" text at the bottom. It makes sense for nested directories and looks like main feature of Broot. But for _current directory_ it would be great if it didn't "trim" entries at the end and you could just use standard arrows keys, PageUp/PageDown and Home/End to quickly glance and see what files are available when I don't know what file names I'm looking for. And when I would want to do the same for some nested directory I would just select it with Enter. So basically it would be great if Broot was more like https://github.com/junegunn/fzf but not just for flat list of files.

pdimitar10• 7 years ago

I learned about bat and fd from you and had no clue before, thank you!

cliqueiq• 7 years ago

you can just vim into a dir and get a collapsible tree. i don't see any reason to invent yet another tool for something tree -f | grep foo can do. More supply chain hell, more useless tooling, more bloat IMO, prob for some junior dev's "portfolio"/"resume".

santa_boy• 7 years ago

This looks good and I can understand the use case. Pretty neat!

Just for those who don't want to learn more ... you can get a lot of similar utility experience using:

`tmux` (for panes with mouse support) and `fish` (for autocomplete)

I prefer to handle lot of the additional function over `ls` or `tree` that is offered by `broot` in separate panes.

I just feel it is more manageable and interactive with a lot of flexibility.

wakkaflokka• 7 years ago

I really love this. First thing I tried to do was use vim keybindings though... that would make this absolutely stellar.

quacker• 7 years ago

You can open directories in Vim, with netrw which is usually there by default: https://shapeshed.com/vim-netrw/#netrw---the-unloved-directo...

frequentnapper• 7 years ago

thanks to this i looked at Rust again. Going over the Rust book: https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/book/. The concepts of ownership and borrowing made instant sense whereas before I had ignored Rust after hearing that it was way too complex. I think I just might take it up as a hobby.

acd• 7 years ago

Brilliant idea to fold files.

meonico2• 7 years ago

In order to install this you'll need 200mb rust + 100mb in .cargo dir it will drag along and then wait like 3m until it compiles this, jesus christ cli app.

wscott2• 7 years ago

In order to build this from source, yes.

maccam94• 7 years ago

Or download a 3MB statically-linked executable...

meonico2• 7 years ago

It doesn't do anything special that ranger cannot, well search is nice indeed but that's it. No vi shortcuts btw.

roryokane• 7 years ago

If anyone is wondering what ranger is, it’s “a console file manager with VI key bindings” whose home page is https://ranger.github.io/.

monkeydust• 7 years ago

So i installed on windows 10 - can run it from the directory via broot but not br nor anything added to PATH. I am doing something wrong here?

dhshahsndeisjwn• 7 years ago

This is amazing. The only problem is I now want all these features within the OS X file open dialog for opening saving files within applications.

mam2• 7 years ago

Super nice. Here's an issue: why when you search the cursor is not the first in the line ? it makes no sense when you make enter when you already know the path and want to go fast

7532yahoogmail• 7 years ago

For some at the office midnight commander still rocks their world....

elwell• 7 years ago

Anti-GUI developers can now get the benefits of GUI visualization while still being cool enough to stay in the terminal. See also: dired-subtree for Emacs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z26b8HKFsNE

Broot – A new way to see and navigate directory trees

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