Who are these for? People who use the terminal but don’t like running shell commands?

OK sorry for throwing shade. If you use one of these, honestly, what features do you use that make it worthwhile?

EDIT: Just to clarify, my point is I would almost always reach for fzf, fd, or rg before trying to manually search through a directory in a file manager.

EDIT2: A few people mentioned selecting files in a TUI. I don’t find it any harder to select files using autocomplete. It might even be faster to start typing a name than it is it “scroll” through a list of files.

EDIT3: Here’s a neat tool that can add some flexibility to your shell workflow: https://github.com/urbanogilson/lineselect

  • Administrator@monyet.cc
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    1 year ago

    As someone who uses nnn (occasionally lf) all the time, terminal file managers make navigation (especially bookmarking) easier.

    Think Nemo’s my default file manager but with GUI file managers I find it hard to switch contexts. I always used to have two splits open with Nemo but if I need to open a new context I’d have to open another instance of Nemo and then I gotta switch between the instances now.

    Now, nnn gives me 4 contexts, which can be easily switched between using 1-4. I’ve added zoxide within nnn to pretty much jump to any directory within my system. This isn’t really possible with a GUI file manager. Guess you can add integration to other tools as well to the list of pros of a terminal file manager.

    File preview needs a mention as well. It’s easier when you can quickly glance a file and move on instead of opening it.

  • atetulo@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    It’s really annoying navigating a filesystem in the shell.

    Either you remember exactly where a file is located, have a reference, or you’re going to be doing a lot of “ls, cd, ls, cd”.

    • taladar@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      Either you remember exactly where a file is located, have a reference, or you’re going to be doing a lot of “ls, cd, ls, cd”.

      You do know tools like find and locate are a thing? If anything it is the graphical tools that do not have a lot of flexibility here.

      • atetulo@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        🥱

        There’s always someone like you, lol.

        Glad I’ve learned to just cut you out and move on.

        Have a nice day!

  • tal@lemmy.today
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    1 year ago

    I use dired in Emacs.

    I assume you mean “why use these instead of file-manipulation commands in bash?”

    I use both.

    There are a handful of tasks that are easier in dired than bash.

    • Making small modifications to filenames that aren’t amenable to programmatic changes. You can just toggle the read-only flag on a dired buffer, edit the filenames, and then hit C-c C-c when done.

    • Marking a set of files to perform an operation on where that set cannot trivially be expressed using tools in bash. Think, oh, “which movies do I like enough to want to keep around”. This is especially handy when moving a number of files to another directory, which I think is why people often like the two-pane approach of orthodox file managers. Dired is not an OFM, but it can act like that if you have two dired windows open, using the other as the default target for the operation.

    • Dealing with filenames containing obnoxious-to-type characters like weird Unicode stuff. If I want to delete the one file in a directory whose name consists of a bunch of kanji, it’s easier to just manually select it in a list.

    • Navigating where I usually want to see the contents of each directory. I’ll often navigate around in dired while building up up an emms playlist. Browsing a list of movies to play.

    EDIT: It’s also not really a file manager, but I do use ncdu to see what’s taking up space on a disk. I’ll also use du -h|sort -h|less, but ncdu is, like file managers, more convenient when just browsing around the tree and looking at each as one does so, while manually selecting a few items to operate on (deleting).

    EDIT2: I’ll also add that virtually all of the people I know in person who love OFMs – I’m in the US – are from Eastern Europe, moved to the US from Russia, Ukraine, Romania, etc. I dunno why that is. Maybe just spreading along language lines. Maybe there are or were issues with switching between Cyrillic and Latin character stuff akin to my above irritation with kanji. But someone from Eastern Europe might have more input to answer your question.

    EDIT3: The link I provided above for OFMs has a very long discussion from the author on why he likes OFMs (though not all terminal file managers are OFMs, many, like Midnight Commander, are). Reading it, I’d say that there’s a lot of overlap with how Emacs works with dired+TRAMP+eshell and some other Emacs packages, though they accomplish similar goals in a different way – sort of making integrated functionality that spans network file transfer, file management, text editing, file archive access, console commands, with a common toolset available for all. Would be quicker to learn an OFM than Emacs, though Emacs is gonna provide a considerably-larger set of functionality if you’re willing to spend the time on it.

    EDIT4: There are also a number of OFMs in Emacs, like Sunrise Commander, so I guess I shouldn’t really treat it as an either-or matter.

    • dino@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 year ago

      Is it common than whenever somebody brings up “emacs” its a wall of text? Please don’t take seriously.