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
• 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, just:

make
sudo make install

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.

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, M to move, r to rename, n to create a new file, N to create a new directory, : to run a command with the selected files in $@, and | to pipe 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.h (the user's version of the defaults in config.def.h). For example, D is bound to rm -rf "$@", which means selecting file_foo and dir_baz, then pressing D will cause bb to run the shell command rm -rf file_foo dir_baz.

Customizing bb

bb comes with a bunch of pre-defined bindings for basic actions in config.def.h (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 add a new entry in bindings in config.h with the form {{keys...}, "<shell command>", "<description>"} The description is shown when pressing ? within bb.

User Input in Scripts

If you need user input in a binding, you can use the ASK(var, prompt, initial) and ASKECHO(prompt, initial) macros, which internally use the read shell function (initial is discarded) or the ask tool, if USE_ASK is set to 1. This is used in a few key bindings by default, including n and :.

Fuzzy Finding

To select from a list of options with a fuzzy finder in a binding, you can use the PICK macro. During the make process, you can use PICKER=fzy, PICKER=fzf, or PICKER=ask to choose which fuzzy finder program bb will use (and provide some default arguments). This is used in the / and Ctrl-f key bindings by default.

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 config file.

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 "$(bb -d "$@" || pwd)"; }

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

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

In both versions, || pwd means 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.