bb/README.md

# bb - An itty bitty browser for command line file management

`bb` (bitty browser) is a TUI console file browser that is:

- Extremely lightweight (currently around 1.4K lines of code)
- Highly interoperable with unix pipelines
- Highly customizable and hackable
- Without any build dependencies other than the C standard library (no ncurses)
- A good proof-of-concept for making a TUI from scratch

The core idea behind `bb` is that almost all actions are performed by piping
selected files to external scripts, rather than having the file manager itself
try to anticipate and hard-code every possible user action. Unix tools are very
good at doing file management, the thing that `bb` adds is immediate visual
feedback and rapid navigation.

For example, instead of using `ls`, then `rm` and typing out file names, you can
just open `bb`, scroll through the list of files, select the ones you want to
delete, and hit `D`. The `D` key's behavior is defined in a single line of code
in `config.h` as passing the selected files as arguments to `rm -rf "$@"`.
That's it! If you want to add a mapping to upload files to your server, you can
just add a binding for `scp user@example.com:~/ "$@"`. Want to zip files? Add
a mapping for `read -p "Archive: " name && zip "$name" "$@"` or, if you have
some complicated one-time task, you can just hit `>` to drop to a shell and run
commands with the selected files available in `$@` (or use `|` to run a quick
one-liner command that gets the selected files piped as input).

## Zero Dependencies

There's a lot of TUI libraries out there like ncurses and termbox, but
essentially all they do is write ANSI escape sequences to the terminal. `bb`
does all of that by itself, just using basic calls to `write()`, with no
external libraries beyond the C standard library. Since `bb` only has to
support the terminal functionality that it uses itself, `bb`'s entire source
code is less than half the size of the source code for an extremely compact
library like termbox, and less than *half a percent* of the size of the source
code for ncurses. I hope anyone checking out this project can see it as a great
example of how you can build a full TUI without ncurses or any external
libraries as long as you're willing to hand-write a few escape sequences.

## Building

`make`
`sudo make install`

## Usage

Just run `bb` to launch the file browser. Press `?` for a full list of
available key bindings. In short: `h`/`j`/`k`/`l` or arrow keys for navigation,
`q` to quit, <space> to toggle selection, `d` to delete, `c` to copy, `m` to
move, `r` to rename, `n` to create a new file, `N` to create a new directory,
and `|` to pipe files to a command.

## Hacking

If you want to customize `bb`, you can add or change the key bindings by
editing `config.h` and recompiling. In [suckless](https://suckless.org/) style,
customizing means editing source code, and compilation is extremely fast.
Key character constants are in `keys.h` and the rest of the code is in `bb.c`.

## License

`bb` is released under the MIT license. See the `LICENSE` file for full details.