bb - An itty bitty browser for command line file management

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

• Extremely lightweight (under 2k 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).

API

bb also exposes an API so that programs can modify bb's internal state. For example, by default, f is bound to bb "+goto:$(fzf)", which has the effect of moving bb's cursor to whatever fzf (a fuzzy finder) prints out. More details about the API can be found in the config file.

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 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.