Maybe there is a tool that does that? Maybe I’m doing this all wrong and there is a different way I should browse?

  • tal@lemmy.today
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    15 hours ago

    If you’d rather stay on the command line, a compromise might be to use something like Midnight Commander. Back in my DOS days I used to use an equivalent there on a regular basis, but that’s because I hadn’t launched Windows and didn’t feel like it was necessary to do what I wanted.

    Note that this class of file managers (two-pane, Norton Commander-alike) are called “orthodox file managers”.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Orthodox_file_managers

    https://softpanorama.org/OFM/index.shtml

    My experience is that people out of Eastern Europe in particular seem to have a history of using these.

    There are also some non-OFM console file managers, like ranger, which might appeal to vim-folk:

    https://github.com/ranger/ranger

    Ranger is a console file manager with VI key bindings. It provides a minimalistic and nice curses interface with a view on the directory hierarchy.

    I use dired in emacs, which does a number of things similarly to an OFM if you have two panes open (though dired is not itself an OFM, and emacs does have Sunrise Commander, which is an OFM).

    Generally, I live in bash, but I find that file managers are handy when you want to manually mark a set of files to run an operation on (like, you can’t programmatically identify them).