bb - An itty bitty browser for command line file management

bb (bitty browser) is a console file browser with a text user interface that is:

• Extremely lightweight (under 2k lines of code)
• Highly interoperable with unix pipelines
• Highly customizable and hackable
• Free of any build dependencies other than the C standard library (no ncurses)
• A good proof-of-concept for making a TUI from scratch

Building

bb has no build dependencies besides make and a C compiler, just:

make
sudo make install

To run bb, it's expected that you have some basic unix tools: basename, cat, cp, echo, find, kill, less, ln, mkdir, more, mv, printf, read, rm, sed, sh, touch, tput, tr.

Usage

Run bb to launch the file browser. bb also has the flags:

• -d: when bb exits successfully, print the directory bb was browsing (see the section on "Changing Directories with bb" in the FAQ below).
• -s: when bb exits successfully, print the files that were selected.
• -0: use NULL-terminated strings instead of newline-separated strings with the -s flag.
• -h: print usage
• -v: print version

Within bb, press ? for a full list of available key bindings. In short: h/j/k/l (or arrow keys) for navigation, q to quit, Enter to open a file, <space> to toggle selection, d to delete, C to copy, Ctrl-v to move, r to rename, Ctrl-n to create a new file or directory, : to run a command with the selected files in $@, and | to pipe the selected files to a command. Pressing Ctrl-c will cause bb to exit with a failure status and without printing anything.

More information about usage can also be found by running man bb after installing.

bb's Philosophy

The core idea behind bb is that bb is a file browser, not a file manager, which means bb uses shell scripts to perform all modifications to the filesystem (passing selected files as arguments), rather than reinventing the wheel by hard-coding operations like rm, mv, cp, touch, and so on. Shell scripts can be bound to keypresses in ~/.config/bb/bindings.bb. For example, D is bound to a script that prints a confirmation message, then runs rm -rf "$@" && bbcmd deselect refresh, which means selecting file1 and file2, then pressing D will cause bb to run the shell command rm -rf file1 file2 and then tell bb to deselect all (now deleted) files and refresh.

Customizing bb

bb runs a script at startup (by default bbstartup.sh, installed to /etc/xdg/bb/bbstartup.sh) that sets up bb's key bindings and a few other minor things. You can override this with your own custom startup script by creating a file at ~/.config/bb/bbstartup.sh. The default startup script loads key bindings from (in order) /etc/xdg/bb/bindings.bb and ~/.config/bb/bindings.bb (or if neither exists, from the local directory).

bb comes with a bunch of pre-defined bindings for basic actions in bindings.bb (installed to /etc/xdg/bb/bindings.bb). It's very easy to add new bindings for whatever custom scripts you want to run, just create a file called ~/.config/bb/bindings.bb and put your bindings there. You can also create bindings at runtime by hitting Ctrl-b, pressing the key you want to bind, and then entering in a script to run (in case you want to set up an easy way to repeat some custom workflow).

API

bb also exposes an API that allows shell scripts to modify bb's internal state. To do this, call bbcmd <your command> from within bb. For example, by default, j is bound to bbcmd move:+1, which has the effect of moving bb's cursor down one item. More details about the API can be found in the API documentation or by running man bbcmd after installing.

FAQ

Using bb to Change Directory

Applications cannot change the shell's working directory on their own, but you can define a shell function that uses the shell's builtin cd function on the output of bb -d (print directory on exit). For bash (or sh, zsh, etc.), you can put the following function in your ~/.profile (or ~/.bashrc, ~/.zshrc, etc.):

function bcd() { cd "$(bb -d "$@")"; }

For fish (v3.0.0+), you can put this in your ~/.config/fish/functions/:

function bcd; cd (bb -d $argv); end

In both versions, the directory will not change if bb exits with failure (e.g. by pressing Ctrl-c).

Launching bb with a Keyboard Shortcut

Using a keyboard shortcut to launch bb from the shell is something that is handled by your shell. Here are some examples for binding Ctrl-b to launch bb and change directory to bb's directory (using the bcd function defined above). For sh and bash, put this in your ~/.profile:

bind '"\C-b":"bcd\n"'

For fish, put this in your ~/.config/fish/functions/fish_user_key_bindings.fish:

bind \cB 'bcd; commandline -f repaint'

License

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