hnicke / sodalite

A keyboard-driven, terminal-based file navigator and launcher: Exploration at the speed of thought.

sodalite: Exploration at the speed of thought

Yet another file explorer

Have you ever played crawl? That's a terminal based roguelike dungeon crawler.
What makes it stand out is it's extremely efficient menu navigation philsophy.

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup: For selecting an item, press it's automatically assigned key.

After a while, the keys burn into one's muscle memory - using the game's interface feels extremely efficient.
sodalite brings the same feature to your file system: Navigation at the speed of thought.

Navigate the file system

When opening sodalite, you will see the listing of the current directory.
Pressing one of the keys displayed in front of the entries will navigate there.

Assign the most intuitive and/or reachable keys to your most frequently used entries, and stick with this assignment. Once setup, and muscle memory kicks in, all directories will be reachable in a blink of an eye!

When navigating to a plain text file, a file preview is shown:

Installation

Linux

Debian-based Distros (e.g., Ubuntu)

# add apt key and repository http://debian.hnicke.de/repo/
sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 5B08767916BCFCE7
echo "deb [arch=amd64] http://debian.hnicke.de/repo/ unstable main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/sodalite.list
sudo apt-get update

# install
sudo apt install sodalite

Arch Linux

AUR package sodalite:

yay -S sodalite

Getting started

Check out the manpage for detailed usage information.

FAQ

The default 'open' hook doesn't work / launches weird programs :(

Most probably it is not sodalite's fault, but your mime default application list isn't configured correctly. Run the following command to find the associated application for given file:

xdg-mime query default $(xdg-mime query filetype <file>)

In order to change the default application for a files mime type, run:

xdg-mime default <desktop> $(xdg-mime query filetype <file>)

Replace <file> with the file you're trying to open and <desktop> with name of the desktop entry file of your new default app. If you're not sure what's the name of the desktop entry of a specific app, look for it in /usr/share/applications.

Alternatively you can edit the mime app list manually: $HOME/.config/mimeapps.list

Or learn more about mime.

Changelog

Don't miss out on what has changed: Read the changelog.

Contributing

Do you want to contribute to the project? Check out the developer guide.

License

See copyyright.

sodalite's Issues

See frequent entries as list

Top x frequently used items are displayed in a list.

Possible implementation:

• upon startup, most x frequently used entries are queried from db
• in a special directory, symbolic links to these entries are created
• special directory is accessible via shortcut (e.g., ,)

Use sensible fallback if no configuration file is found

Application crashes when a directory does not exist

What happened:

1. Opened sodalite in a specific dir.
2. Changed branch. The specific dir and its parent do not exist anymore
3. go_to_parent: crashes

Possible solution:

Before visiting a directory (I think from history), check if it exists. If not,
go to grandparent, etc && notify user!

Use [count] for go_to_parent built-in

normal.go_to_parent [n].

Navigates to nth parent.
E.g., pressing 4. equals cd ../../../..

[] bracket notation means optional (like in regular expressions)

Reflect external file system changes

Whenever the current entry is modified from outside of sodalite, reflect these changes.

Possible implementation:

• make use of inotify
  • subscribe to current entry
  • handle every event accordingly

publish package in aur

Bookmarks

It shall be possible to

• add current entry to bookmarks
• show bookmarks

Implementation:

• bookmarks is a concrete directory
• bookmarking an entry creates a symlink in that dir

Caveeats:

• how to handle name conflicts?

End user documentation:

normal.go_to_bookmarks '

Navigate to the bookmark directory.

normal.toggle_bookmark ^

Add the current entry to bookmarks.
If the current entry is already bookmarked, remove from bookmarks.

Persistent navigation history

The navigation history shall be persistent between sessions. This is really helpful for following use case:

1. user is in starting dir x
2. User launches sodalite
3. user navigates to target dir y
4. user quits sodalite
5. user does some work in target dir y
6. user relaunches sodalite
7. user navigates back in history to get back to x

navigation hooks

add navigation hooks:

• they work similar as action hooks.
• can be specified in config
• in contrast to action hooks they don't get triggered by an action, but whenever a specified dir is traveled to
• basically, its consist out of:
  • corresponding dir
  • hook
  • description
• whenever a hook is triggered, there should be some sort of notification

When is this handy?

• ctags
• some sort of project specific stuff / cleanup / build instructions

Display current mode

Display the current mode in the bottom left corner (like in vim).

Write manpage

Write a manpage listing all supported features / keybindings

• also add to installer

Tabbing

Implement tabbing:

• each tab has own navigation history
• tabs can get changed with shortcuts, e.g.:
  • <M-[1-9]> to access tab [1-9]
  • <M-[hl]> tab left / tab right

Replace `$HOME` with `~` when displaying paths

Support dynamic resizing

Toggle visibility of hidden files

Make it possible to toggle the visibility of hidden files.

Add `execute` hook to default config

Add execute hook to default config in order to execute the current file.

add github readme

Missing data dir makes application crash on startup

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/heiko/dev/sodalite/bin/../sodalite/main.py", line 6, in <module>
    from core.config import Config
  File "/home/heiko/dev/sodalite/sodalite/core/config.py", line 6, in <module>
    from util import environment
  File "/home/heiko/dev/sodalite/sodalite/util/environment.py", line 20, in <module>
    os.mkdir(user_data)
FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/home/heiko/.local/share/sodalite/'

Filtering in assign mode broken

Rename config from `.conf` to `.yml`

When viewing a file, 'Go to parent' navigates to grand parent

Note: 'Go to previous' behaves correctly in that case.

Support custom action hooks

Allow user to define custom action hooks in configuration file.

logger should show classname

a logline should contain the class which logged it

Customize default keymap

Make it possible to customize the default keymap.

Use frecency instead of frequency

Instead of frequency, frecency shall be used for sorting entries. See here for an explanation of frecency.

Disable arrow keys in assign mode

When pressing arrow keys in the assign mode, all entries vanish. Arrow keys shall be disabled.

Restructure project

As this project slowly is leaving its proof of concept phase, the code needs to be refactored heavily.

Upcoming tasks:

• Enhance data model

  • add file permissions directly to entry

• Decouple GUI and core: Design slim interface

• Divide core into several classes (extract both file access and db access)

• refactor action hooks

• refactor gui
  -[ ] use suitable framework to decouple gui from logic - might use RxPy

Preview content of plain text file

When current entry is a plain text file, show its content.

Make hook visiblity optional

Add possibility in the configuration file to declare visibility of a hook.

Implementation:

• if label is omitted, hook shall not get displayed

scrolling in navigation / assign pane

add means to scroll through navigation / assign pane

Sorting entries

Make it possible to sort entries.
Sort criteria:

• name
• creation date
• smart (smart equals the current way of sorting entries)

Add shortcut which takes user to system root directory

Integrate suitable framework to decouple ui from logic

• Choose a framework which supports decoupling ui from logic.
• integrate this framework into current codebase

regex in filter

add support for regex in filter function

Allow input for custom hooks

When executing a hook, the user shall be able to supply input at runtime.

• $1, $2, etc can be used in hooks as input placeholders
• when executing the hook, user must supply the values (via commandline?)

Not yet sure:

• supply label for each input in hook definition? This label can then be displayed
  in commandline

Change cwd when triggering actionhook

Currently, when triggering an actionhook which exits sodalite, the current working directory is not changed.

Expected behaviour: Change working dir to current entry. If current entry is file, change working dir to parent dir.

Display file details

Display file details like permissions, file size and access times.

Visual select

Add visual selection mode.

No licence specified

There is no licence specified. AFAIK, in most countries this equals "all rights reserved".

keys are occasionaly forgotten / swapped randomly

sometimes an entry loses its former navigation key and ends up having none or another key.
However, no duplicate keys in a directory are observed.

Add vim-like bookmarks

Idea:

• Press ^M to toggle 'new-bookmark'-mode, followed by any navigation key; stores current entry with given key as bookmark
• Press ' followed by a navigation key to travel to this bookmark
  • if bookmark does not exist, print message (like "bookmark not found")
  • after pressing ', display list of bookmarks (in popup?)

Improve shell integration

Supplied shell integration shall handle paths which are files and not directories.

[ -f <path> ] && cd $(dirname <path>)

Architecture

• find suitable architecture
• refactor current codebase to reflect chosen architecture

'Go to previous' (backspace) not triggered on certain computing hardware

Obsolete database entries not deleted recursively

Event: An obsolete database entry is encountered.
Current behavior: Entry is deleted from database.
Expected behavior: Entry is deleted from database, including all child entry.

Crashing when navigating to directory without read permission

'Go to parent' shall differ from 'Go to previous'

Currently, pressing . navigates to the previous directory.
Actually, the semantics of . should be cd ...
But when the last visited entry was a symlink, the previous entry does differ from the parent entry.

Current functionality of . shall be triggered with BACKSPACE and its semantics shall be: Go to previous, whereas . shall truly mean go to parent.

Entry color shall reflect file type and frequency

For better orientation, the color of entries (in the UI) shall reflect:

• its filetype
  • dir
  • file
  • link
  • executable
• its frequency
  • the more frequent (relative to other entries in the current dir), the brighter the color

Copy path of current entry to clipboard

Add possibility to copy the current path to the system clipboard.

Fuzzy mode when filtering

When filtering the entry list, allow fuzzy finding.