Who are these for? People who use the terminal but don’t like running shell commands?
OK sorry for throwing shade. If you use one of these, honestly, what features do you use that make it worthwhile?
EDIT: Just to clarify, my point is I would almost always reach for fzf, fd, or rg before trying to manually search through a directory in a file manager.
EDIT2: A few people mentioned selecting files in a TUI. I don’t find it any harder to select files using autocomplete. It might even be faster to start typing a name than it is it “scroll” through a list of files.
EDIT3: Here’s a neat tool that can add some flexibility to your shell workflow: https://github.com/urbanogilson/lineselect
Well, for schoolwork, I mount my Google Drive storage onto my ~/googledrive directory (where I store all of my schoolwork) and usually use mc to navigate. Although, I am quite comfortable with the terminal. Its just that I have a lot of subfolders and going to a specific subfolder in mc is usually faster than doing “cd ~/googledrive/subfolder-with-long-path”.
Have you looked into Autojump? It works with bash and zsh and is even faster than using a terminal file manager if you’ve already visited the directory before
I still kinda don’t see the point. Like, typing cd /usr/share/xsessions is not that much slower than j xsessions or however it would work. Also, how does it actually work? What if I visit both $HOME/backgrounds and /usr/share/backgrounds very often?
It’s for when you have really nested directories. It happens especially when you’re working in a file space used by others. I used to have a folder I would often reach called /media/nas/documents/personal/school/foo/bar/foobar2001/projectA
I ended up going back to that project so many times, I could just do
j projectAand get there from anywhere. “Why not use a symlink?” I hear you say. Well it’s because I often have to go to projectB or another which was in another really nested dir. Or I needed to jump to another directory which was equally as nested, and only had to use it frequently for like a week or so. Making and deleting symlinks all the time wasn’t practical. Not to mention some software doesn’t properly follow symlinksWhat I usually do for that sort of thing is define some variables that go to my most visited.
Aliases? That could work quite well imo, and I have some to launch my most frequently opened config files, such as my qtile config
alias qtile-conf="nvim ~/.config/qtile/config.py"How do you mount the GDrive ? What app allows you that ? I know gnome allows it but since moving to sway I gave up on it
Rsync can do this.
I use rclone. The command I use to mount my GDrive is basically:
rclone mount "GoogleDrive:" ~/googledrive --vfs-cache-mode full --daemonAnd then I could access it (almost) as if were a regular USB drive mounted onto my filesystem (by doing
cd ~/googledrive). Only difference is that it is a bit slow, as none of the files ever get synced to the computer’s hard drive (all changes are immediately uploaded to Google servers), and I cannot change the filesystem permissions (they are always a+rw for all of the files).