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

No 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, grep, mkdir, more, mv, printf, read, rm, sed, sh, sleep, touch, tput, tr, wait.

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, <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.

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, p is bound to $PAGER "$@", which means selecting file1 and file2, then pressing p will cause bb to run the shell command $PAGER file1 file2.

Customizing bb

bb comes with a bunch of pre-defined bindings for basic actions in bindings.bb (installed to /etc/xdg/bb/bindings.bb) (within bb, press ? to see descriptions of the bindings), but it's very easy to add new bindings for whatever custom scripts you want to run, just mkdir -p ~/.config/bb && cp -n /etc/xdg/bb/bindings.bb ~/.config/bb/ and edit ~/.config/bb/bindings.bb to have your new bindings. You can also create bindings at runtime by hitting Ctrl-b (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 bb +<your command> from within bb. For example, by default, j is bound to bb +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.

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 (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.