bb - A bitty browser for command line file management

bb is a TUI console file browser that is:

• Extremely lightweight (currently around 1.2K 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 without using any libraries

The core idea behind bb is that almost all actions are performed by piping selected files to external scripts, rather than hard-coding actions. Unix tools are very good at doing file management, the thing that bb adds is immediate visual feedback and rapid navigation.

For example, normally on the command line, if you wanted to manually delete a handful of files, you would first get a listing of the files with ls, then type rm followed by typing out the names of the files (with some tab autocompletion). With bb, you can just launch bb, see all the files immediately, select the ones you want with a few keystrokes, and press D to delete them (or d for deleting with confirmation). The D key's behavior is defined in a single line of code in config.h to pipe the selected files to xargs -0 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 xargs scp user@example.com or, if you have some complicated one-time task, you can just hit | and type in any arbitrary command and have the selected files piped to it.

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, 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.