Superfile – A fancy, pretty terminal file manager

https://github.com/MHNightCat/superfile

by oidar • 2 years ago

413 141 2 years ago

github.com

teddyh• 2 years ago

Why is this better than Midnight Commander or GNU Interactive Tools?

hidelooktropic• 2 years ago

There's not so much as a screenshot of MC on their official page. Hard to say.

Did the author say their product was better?

yjftsjthsd-h• 2 years ago

I think it's fair to ask of any new program why to use it rather than an existing option. And there can be lots of reasons - more active development, new features, less buggy, smaller program (uses less disk/memory, easier to be less buggy), easier to install, easier to use, whatever. And the author of a program doesn't necessarily need to have an answer, especially not early on; programming is sometimes its own reward, and sometimes advantages only become obvious later. But as a user, yeah it's useful to know what advantage this thing has over all the other things that do the ~same stuff.

camgunz• 2 years ago

Is the author really only 16? Wow!

idunnoman1222• 2 years ago

Brew install superfile

Now guess what the executable is called…

fkyoureadthedoc• 2 years ago

I almost didn't even try to figure it out after I installed and the `superfile` command didn't work.

lsllc• 2 years ago

Yes, I had the same question! (`spf` for the curious!)

EDIT: To be fair, right at the beginning of the tutorial is:

First, if you want to open superfile by opening a terminal and typing spf.

quesera• 2 years ago

A symlink would be a good solution.

eddd-ddde• 2 years ago

This happens to me quite often.

pacman -Ql <package> | grep bin

There must be similar commands for other package managers.

micklemeal• 2 years ago

This looks pretty nice! I like the ability to add multiple file panels versus tabs that are common with nnn and ranger. Going to give this a spin today.

TheAmazingRace• 2 years ago

Wow, this looks super slick! Kudos to the developer for a fantastic little project!

qudat• 2 years ago

Looks like it's using bubbletea, nice!

berzzz• 2 years ago

Very nice!

schindlabua• 2 years ago

Love 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!

jjuel• 2 years ago

Isn't the terminal program technically a GUI?

ghodith• 2 years ago

Technically a TUI?

hxegon• 2 years ago

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 really incredible. I'm building a multiplayer tetris you can play through ssh, which is using bubbletea and another lib of theirs called wish.

they have a lot of stuff you can just use in regular shell stuff too: https://charm.sh

leetrout• 2 years ago

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

snapplebobapple• 2 years ago

For me its rofi and a tiny bar on top of (ne of my hyprland windows for basic information (clock,calendar,widgets for network/volume/screenbrightness) its awesome

copperbrick25• 2 years ago

Tried it out for a minute and it crashed because I had a broken recursive symlink in my home directory:

1. Create a recursive symlink to itself: `ln -s test test`

2. open superfile and navigate to it.

3. Observe crash

night_cat9• 2 years ago

Hey, thanks for the report, I fixed it!

kwhitefoot3• 2 years ago

"You can go to the latest release and download the binary file. Once it is downloaded please excrate the file after that enter the following in your terminal:"

Is excrate some new jargon meaning to take something out of a crate? Or just a boring typo for extract?

night_cat9• 2 years ago

Just typo..

kwhitefoot3• 2 years ago

Shame! :-)

nine_k3• 2 years ago

It's a perfectly cromulent word. Let's use it more widely, and it will become a real word, like "quiz" or "blog" have become.

NikkiA• 2 years ago

Or a typo for extricate

wegwerff• 2 years ago

Typo for "execrate" meaning "invoke a curse on". If you find the right spell to cast in your terminal, it will reveal its contents to you.

kwhitefoot3• 2 years ago

$ spf spf: /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.34' not found (required by spf) spf: /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.32' not found (required by spf)

I'm on Linux Mint 19

mcbuilder• 2 years ago

This is a linking issue (you're missing a specific version of a dynamically linked standard library), and probably best in the issues on the repo, not Hacker News.

antihero• 2 years ago

They could build it with CGO_ENABLED=0, if they are using Alpine, perhaps.

opheliate• 2 years ago

An operating system from 2018 which is no longer maintained by its vendor? https://www.linuxmint.com/rel_tara_cinnamon_whatsnew.php

I think it's somewhat unreasonable to expect software released today will necessarily work on your environment without some legwork.

isopede• 2 years ago

Is it though? I can run Windows programs from 20 years ago on my Windows machine just fine.

Issues with Linux binary distribution meanwhile are ubiquitous, with glibc probably being the single biggest offender. What's worse is that you can't even really statically link it without herculean effort. I've spent an inordinate amount of my life trying to wrangle third-party binaries on Linux libraries and it's just a sorry state of affairs.

Try taking a binary package from a vendor from even just 5 years ago and there's a non-zero chance it won't run on your modern distro.

colatkinson• 2 years ago

Your version of glibc is too old. Mint 19 is based off Ubuntu 18.04, which ships glibc 2.27, whereas this binary seems to require symbol versions first shipped in glibc 2.34.

You'll have to compile from source, or update your distro to a maintained version. Ubuntu 22.04 ships glibc 2.35, and so Mint 21 should work.

Mostly commenting because while this isn't really a tech support channel, being able to identify glibc version mismatch errors comes up extremely often, even in this day and age.

anta40• 2 years ago

Very cool. Seems like a revamped version of Midnight Commander. Let me try..

lupusreal• 2 years ago

Looks very swanky. Not sure if I'll replace ranger but this is definitely a contender.

srwest• 2 years ago

If 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.

likeclockwork2• 2 years ago

Holy shit, thanks for the warning.

patwie• 2 years ago

These key-bindings are pure evil for vim users.

gouggoug• 2 years ago

Even for non-vim users this default is absolutely horrendous

StrLght• 2 years ago

So there's no confirmation for deletion? Oof, that's probably the most unsafe default I have seen in a while.

night_cat9• 2 years ago

There will be a prompt for complete deletion, but there will be no prompt for putting it in the trash can.

godelski3• 2 years ago

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 <C-[> (esc) or contextual completion like <C-x><C-p> (: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 <C-w>. Go from trying to delete a word (backwards) but end up losing a whole session. It's such muscle memory I sometimes do it on webpages, but maybe that one is a feature instead of a bug lol

jez• 2 years ago

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.

moelf• 2 years ago

and they don't also rebind <C-w>. Go from trying to delete a word (backwards) but end up losing a whole session

This is literally why Vim binding for Jupyter doesn't work for me and also why the "terminal" in Jupyter Lab is worse than not existing -- I can't help but press C-w

slim• 2 years ago

we old vi users don't use key combinations, that's an emacs thing :)

night_cat9• 2 years ago

Btw, this is not actually deleted, but put in the trash can.

But it seems that this hotkey is not good for many people. It may be changed in the next version. Thanks for your feedback.

ghostly_s• 2 years ago

I use a number of apps where ctrl-d is a common non-destructive shortcut, and can't recall ever encountering one where it was used for delete.

opan3• 2 years ago

In ranger, dd is cut/mv and dD is delete, but dD on one file spawns a command with :delete typed in so you have to hit enter to pull the trigger, and doing it with multiple files has the same behavior plus adds a y/N prompt asking if you're sure you want to delete those specific files. This is enough friction to prevent most mishaps, but not enough to be annoying. I would suggest taking inspiration from this.

behnamoh2• 2 years ago

How do I undo CTRL-d deletes? I almost deleted all my home dir...

luqtas• 2 years ago

what's even the point of downloading something so banal & not read the docs; comment at the post WITH the warning of it not complaining with Vim shortcuts when it's clear that Emacs is ballparks better? /s

twobitshifter• 2 years ago

Yes those defaults won’t really work for vim. Escape exits the program, without even using it, I already know I am going to exit a zillion times once my brain thinks I am in Vim.

But the good thing is they are just defaults. Hopefully there are already no legions of users resistant to any changes to defaults.

tmtvl• 2 years ago

I used vim for 5 years and never knew about C-d for scrolling until after I had switched to Emacs and one day, on a whim, decided to install and activate evil and look what various commands were bound to. I removed evil immediately afterwards as 5 years of vim taught me to hate modal editing with a passion.

3523582908• 2 years ago

gorgeous!! did you build the ui yourself or did you use a package to help? how did that go?

paranoidxprod• 2 years ago

Seems like they're using Bubble Tea, a Terminal UI framework for Go. I've heard very good things about it and have been meaning to check it out.

https://github.com/charmbracelet/bubbletea

Cu3PO42• 2 years ago

The same project has an application called Gum which exposes primitives from their UI framework via a single CLI binary. It's intended to be used from a normal bash script and I've found it really quite pleasant to use.

For example, you could write 'gum choose foo bar baz' to get a nice picker over the three provided options.

Their repo has a ton of examples: https://github.com/charmbracelet/gum

safetytrick• 2 years ago

With a dependency on a font. Wow, it's been a while since I've seen that.

explosion-s• 2 years ago

Fairly commonplace for TUIs that use icon. Tons of vim plugins rely on NerdFonts (A regular monospace font that also includes tons of icons)

apitman5• 2 years ago

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

terminaltrove2• 2 years ago

superfile looks great, we have this listed on the trove (1) for other package managers, we love what's been done recently in the terminal / tui space.

I encourage also supporting the author as well on their ko-fi page for a new laptop. (2)

1. https://terminaltrove.com/superfile/

2. https://ko-fi.com/night_cat

night_cat9• 2 years ago

Thanks you so much,I really like terminal trove!

pandemic_region• 2 years ago

Thanks for the terminal trove tip ! Subscribed.

I feel the market is ripe for a terminal ide again. Anything interesting going in in that space?

terminaltrove2• 2 years ago

We think so too, as an example there is harlequin, a beautiful terminal based SQL IDE.

https://terminaltrove.com/harlequin/

https://harlequin.sh/

gigatexal• 2 years ago

play this is very pretty

insane_dreamer2• 2 years ago

Looks nice! Not sure if it's enough to pry me away from MC, but worth a look.

insane_dreamer2• 2 years ago

very first impression after <30 sec: having to press ^F or any key to enable filename/folder search in a folder creates friction vs. MC's approach where typing automatically starts search of current folder so you can hit a couple of keys, press enter, etc. Would be nice if that were a mode here too.

sooheon• 2 years ago

This type-to-search-immediately functionality is why I still have Launchbar installed on all my Macs -- there's nothing faster for navigation/moving/operations, even in the terminal.

godisdad• 2 years ago

Dope. Reminds me of far.exe

swozey• 2 years ago

This reminds me of a Windows 3.5 app called List (IIRC) that one day I lost the floppy to and as a 7 year old kid was completely lost without. So I installed bsd and broke my dads computer instead.

anigbrowl• 2 years ago

  brew install superfile
  (ok)
  superfile
  (not found)
  find superfile
  (not sound)
  cd /usr/local/Cellar/superfile/1.1.2/bin
  ls
  spf

This is mentioned in the tutorial but it's probably worth mentioning in the install section to save people 5-10 minutes of confusion. Once I found the filename I loved it.

medstrom5• 2 years ago

Or even provide superfile as an alias which prints a message saying "you can also call it as spf", once a day. People don't read install sections.

stormking• 2 years ago

The problem is that it's not mentioned in the installation instructions, only in the tutorial.

naikrovek• 2 years ago

ok i'm a bit late to this post but can you explain why you use a terminal file manager UI? I've never found myself using these except very early in my computing career before I knew the DOS copy commands to use.

dotancohen• 2 years ago

I feel the same way. Bash is my file manager.

wkrsz• 2 years ago

I'm waiting for preview feature: https://github.com/MHNightCat/superfile/issues/26

Fortunately it's now on top of the to-do list: https://github.com/users/MHNightCat/projects/4/views/1

qwertox• 2 years ago

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nnn_(file_manager)

necrotic_comp2• 2 years ago

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 ?

wonger_2• 2 years ago

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 slow. There's solutions for a better cd, involving z or fzf or whatever. But a file manager should solve it too.

- a file manager, especially a two-pane view, is cognitively easier. Better UX. Example: Having a src/ pane on one side and dst/ on the other, selecting a few src/ files, then performing a copy command. You get instant visual feedback to confirm that the files appeared in dst/. Compared to ls, cp file1 file2 file3 dst/, ls dst/. I always feel the need to ls after commands because the command-line doesn't give much feedback.

tldr: speed, ux, comfort. But if you're already comfortable with your tools, I think that's the most important thing.

necrotic_comp2• 2 years ago

Thanks. That makes sense. I guess I'm just super entrenched - very comfortable with my tooling and would generally write a one-liner for something like the above.

The way I do it is a bit nuts though, and you're right, the above is much more consistent and has its advantages

bregma• 2 years ago

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.

massysett• 2 years ago

With long filenames with characters like spaces, it can be easier to see them in a list, pick the ones you want, and operate on them in a GUI or TUI (same principle applies to Emacs Dired) than in a CLI. I can use the CLI and stumble around running ls multiple times and using tab completion, but the GUI or TUI can just be easier.

fernly• 2 years ago

My goodness but there is a whole lot of these! (Found the below table from the Nnn wiki page, mentioned above.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_managers

baobun• 2 years ago

For anyone else (considering) switching file manager: Check if it depends on the gvfs package or not. You either want it (virtual filesystem support, stuff working "out of the box", background daemon, DE integrations) or you don't.

So there's one factor to cut the search-space in ~half :)

I'm recently trying out worker[0] and so far it's great.

[0] http://www.boomerangsworld.de/cms/worker/index.html

monopoliessuck• 2 years ago

This looks neat, but has a lot going on.

I really like how minimalist yet extensible lf [0] is and just use edir [1] to rename files in bulk. Gluing them both together is really easy too.

- [0] https://github.com/gokcehan/lf

- [1] https://github.com/bulletmark/edir

christophilus• 2 years ago

I love that there are a lot of great options in this space. This one looked nice due to its selection pane: https://xplr.dev/

sneak2• 2 years ago

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.

friend_and_foe3• 2 years ago

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.

sneak2• 2 years ago

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.

night_cat9• 2 years ago

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

shdisi• 2 years ago

I tried this out and within a few minutes had delete a few directories. Luckily I was in a git repo but I still immediately uninstalled this

stefandesu• 2 years ago

When did you try it and do you have an idea why it could have happened? I'm simply curious about it, but this doesn't sound great. I found this issue [1] which should have been fixed in version 1.1.1 [2].

[1] https://github.com/MHNightCat/superfile/issues/72 [2]: https://github.com/MHNightCat/superfile/releases/tag/v1.1.1

friend_and_foe3• 2 years ago

Just tried this out...

Looks nice. I dig the nerd font thing, I'd never used them because all of my TUI stuff is ncurses and the like, it's a nice thing to be able to do. I like the outline. I don't like a few things.

- Ctrl keys galore. I'm partial to vim keys, a lot of the keybinds on here are vim style, why not make it all of them?

- some of the defaults are weird or potentially dangerous. There's no confirmation for deletion for example, PageUp and PageDown don't work, cursor auto wraparound is a little confusing for something like this, and the cursor isn't a highlight, just a >.

- Bubbletea always seem to have a minimum terminal size which drives me nuts. Btop and other programs I've used have this problem.

All in all I like the ability to open multiple panes, the ability to open network drives, see ongoing/completed processes and see the clipboard. I find I virtually never need more than two panes though, and there are plenty of CLI utilities for FTP and stuff. I'm probably going to stick with an old school dual pane like vifm or MC. I'll keep this on my machine and test it out some more next time I need to connect to an ftp server or something, I like that it provides most of the functionality that graphical file managers like Nautilus have, I do miss some of that stuff in my terminal oriented environment, but not enough to go full mouse, so it's good to know I have an option that gives me some of both.

Iwan-Zotow• 2 years ago

Does it work in Windows terminal? Any good?

opan3• 2 years ago

Based on the comments here about weird inconsistent keybinds and accidental file deletions, I won't be trying this for now, but I will keep an eye on it. I use ranger very heavily every day, but it being slow pythonware is sometimes a problem with extra large dirs and when changing the sort mode often. lf is too barebones for me, I don't know how to recreate everything I'm used to from ranger. Something fully-featured but faster than ranger would be ideal.

If you're taking suggestions, making file copies use rsync under the hood would be great. I used to copy files over sshfs with ranger a lot and then found out the hard way that it was occasionally failing/being interrupted and then silently moving on in the transfer queue, so I had partial and corrupted video files it took months to notice. I do also use rsync for transfers a lot of the time, but sometimes you wanna move a bunch of files to different directories, and something like ranger is just faster and easier. Especially when you don't want everything from the source on the destination for space reasons, so can't just rsync whole dirs to grab the new stuff.

sudddddd• 2 years ago

As an alternative to ranger, I have switched to yazi completely.

behnamoh2• 2 years ago

yazi is written in Rust. Holy shit, this is the 10th app I try that's written in Rust and all of them are super fast and snappy!

LAC-Tech• 2 years ago

What is a "nerd font" and why does this app need one?

(Yes I know I could look it up but maybe this will spark a discussion)

wormius• 2 years ago

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 <= it merges so it looks more like the math symbol of a less than sign and a single line at the same angle just below the < sign...)

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, that the folder and file icons are part of the nerdfonts as well, that regular fonts would just show as the generic "missing glyph" symbol.

apitman5• 2 years ago

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?

bomewish• 2 years ago

Started with nnn, switched to yazi — it’s amazing. Any other solution would have to be incredibly good to switch.

coppsilgold• 2 years ago

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

night_cat9• 2 years ago

This is theoretically only needed the first time a new version is used and its purpose is to download the themes.

night_cat9• 2 years ago

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

slmjkdbtl• 2 years ago

I find most ergonomic to write file manager as a vim plugin, I can just open things directly as buffers, only need to hit one key to toggle between file editor and file manager.

courseofaction• 2 years ago

Looks awesome, but it's hard to use intuitively without hotkeys on screen.

pmarreck• 2 years ago

"Thanks for use superfile!"

hxii• 2 years ago

I personally use broot[1] to achieve something similar. I’ve you open two panes, you can copy or move items between them.

I also sometimes use it as a pseudo IDE.

[1] https://dystroy.org/broot

Superfile – A fancy, pretty terminal file manager

Related Stories