3.0 KiB
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.