Lf: How To Turn It Into A Really Powerful File Manager

[@BrodieRobertson]

What programs do you make use of with your terminal file manager, it doesn't have to be lf. Let me know down below.

[@med5032]

2:24 use Jaro for that github.com/isamert/jaro#term My dotfiles: github.com/aliveupstairs/dotfiles/blob/master/.config/associations

[@med5032]

3:38 (2 ways to define commands comment) They're are actually four. $ shell shell command % shell-pipe shell command running with the ui ! shell-wait shell command waiting for key press & shell-async shell command running asynchronously

[@BrodieRobertson]

@@med5032 oh I didn't realise there were 2 others

[@med5032]

5:58 to change the color for executables, you define a file, say ~/.config/LS_COLORS, add EXEC 38;5;107;1 to it, run dircolor ~/.config/LS_COLORS and it will change in that session. I prefer to have this line in my .profile file to do this only once on startup: eval "$(dircolors $HOME/.config/LS_COLORS)" My LS_COLORS: github.com/aliveupstairs/dotfiles/blob/ce5ad8abe620cd6233b2a1998de6f6777faee4a6/.config/LS_COLORS#L16

[@med5032]

For unarchiving, I just use unar theunarchiver.com (it's pretty good) for all of the types and rely on xdg-open (Jaro) to do the unarchiving. I should add refreshing lf after cmd open. Another note is that if you're going to use a key to call a cmd, just define the command in map directly (see my lfrc). I only use cmd when I don't want a keybinding. My lfrc: github.com/aliveupstairs/dotfiles/blob/master/.config/lf/lfrc#L50

[@VeitLehmann]

Wow, lf is really neat! Perfect if you already have your CLI setup nicely and want to build from there so it integrates seamlessly. Also, it's sooo much faster and leaner than ranger! I didn't know any of those file managers, only knew mc until now. Now I quickly tested ranger, lf, nnn, vifm, and mc again (haven't used it for years), and my favorites are clearly lf and ranger. But because of the speed advantage, lf has the edge and I'll look deeper into it. I'll keep ranger installed for inspiration.

[@mysteriouslymysteriousmyst9139]

Just installed it and I like it so far.

[@bobkoss280]

Offtopic - how did you comment/uncomment multiple lines in nvim? Great video. Very informative.

[@xasthul2355]

Thank you for video! Is it possible to bind a key to open lf? I tried to do it with sxhkd and key bindings of my window manager (awesome), but it didn’t work

[@alejodelosreyes6277]

how did you got to have lines between the panels?

[@jobaizen4892]

Hey bro how i can set nvim default text editor when im opening txt file in fl?

[@danieldiaz2093]

Great! very clear and very good configuration. Can you compress files?

[@hoangtu06081991]

so touching for an excellent video

[@humm535]

I tried lf and I think it’s a great program-I just don’t see why you would use it. I’m happy with typical shell commands. Have you actually read the docs of lf? If not-take a few minutes and `lf -doc | $PAGER`.

[@BrodieRobertson]

Its generally going to be quicker especially with actions across directories, if you don't want to use it that's up to you.

[@xllvr]

Been using lf under your recommendations and been having a great experience. This was a blessing as well. Is it possible to do the wallpaper command with sxiv?

[@BrodieRobertson]

No but if you don't want to have feh installed you can replace it with nitrogen, which is just a wallpaper setter

[@xllvr]

I see. Thanks for the reply!

[@edvonrattlehead2135]

unsurprisingly enough luke already automated a way to set a wallaper without either feh nor nitrogen, here's the scrip github.com/LukeSmithxyz/voidrice/blob/master/.local/bin/setbg you can call it from sxiv or from pretty much any file manager.

[@soulofhogwarts]

how can I make new folder or file using lf? And also in st how can you scroll up for seeing long output? Also I thought lf has integrated shell which come up after pressing enter but typing any command nothing do much.

[@BrodieRobertson]

By default lf is a glorified ls you need to add that behaviour in yourself. In st you need to add the scrollback patch to scrollback or use a multiplexer like tmux. I'm not sure about that shell binding I've either removed it or never bothered using it but you could easily bind it yourself.

[@soulofhogwarts]

@@BrodieRobertson Thanks for replying.

[@BrodieRobertson]

@@soulofhogwarts if you check out my lfrc you should get a pretty clear idea to do the binding plus I've got file and folder creation working.

[@imeguras6402]

there's an error on the open command, it should be video/*|image/*|application/pdf not video/*|image/*/application/pdf

[@LawrenceHe]

How do I open SC-IM files in LF? I tried adding *.sc) scim $f;; to my open commands in lfrc but it doesn't work

[@BrodieRobertson]

Is it being caught by a more general case before it gets to that point.

[@LawrenceHe]

@@BrodieRobertson yeah I had the more general text/*) before it so it opened with vim, but I swapped it to put it before that first and it still doesn't seem to work. Here's how I have it now cmd open ${{

[@LawrenceHe]

case $(file --mime-type $f -b) in *.sc) scim $f;; text/*) $EDITOR $fx;; *) open $f & ;; esac

[@lionwolf]

Thank you for tutorial. Have same questions about lf. Is it any opportunity to bind keys for: 1) copy full path of current file (multiple files) to clipboard, 2) copy short path of current file (multiple files) to clipboard, 3) copy name of current file (multiple files) to clipboard, 4) open terminal in current lf directory? Can you help?

[@ribosomerocker]

what do you mean by short path? for the first one, just bind a button to run this command `echo $f | xclip -sel clipboard`, $f is something that lf provides for us with the shell command interface, it's just the file's path. To fet the file's name, do `basename $f | xclip -sel clipboard`, which will copy it to your clipboard P.S.: The backticks (`) are there so signify commands, do not type them in

[@Matthias19961]

Is it possible to start lf always in a specific directory?

[@BrodieRobertson]

You could have lf automatically jump to a folder when you open it

[@luteran42]

i have set shell zsh set shellopts '-eu:--shwordsplit' in my lfrc and trash-cli working for me with spaces in file names.

[@BrodieRobertson]

The problem with that is it's not a very portable solution

[@smccrode]

Can you escape the space characters for trash CLI?

[@BrodieRobertson]

I tried it but I didn't couldn't get it working but that's probably me just being bad at scripting

[@smccrode]

Brodie Robertson darn. I figured you tried it. Did you use sed or something?

[@BrodieRobertson]

@@smccrode yeah that was the first thing that came to mind I'll have another crack at it, I could just have made a mistake

[@BrodieRobertson]

I ended up getting it working. The problem was that the for loop does not care about escaped spaces and was still breaking on them, but you can fix that with IFS=$' '

[@m-k5526]

Can you preview an image file in lf?

[@BrodieRobertson]

I've heard that a few people have come up with ways to do it but out of the box no

[@Yassinebridii]

I got it working, use this config, with the corresponding scripts in the folder: github.com/yassinebridi/.dotfiles/tree/master/lf/.config/lf And instead of running lf directly, run this script instead: github.com/yassinebridi/.dotfiles/blob/master/bin/bin/lfrun It needs python-ueberzug-git to be installed.

[@hermannpaschulke1583]

Who is this Trap Town xyz dude? Iv'e seen this channel in the comments of most of the youtubers I follow 🤔

[@BrodieRobertson]

A spam channel that reuploads trap music

[@nomoredarts8918]

basically actually

[@BrodieRobertson]

true

[@senninscorpion]

Liked: Check Subscribed: Check Commented: Check A tip you could maybe use... I saw your compression choices, gz and bzip2, the good thing about both of them is that they are fast A while back I was looking into compression algorithms, XZ/LZMA2 are great compression algorithms, it wipes the floor with both .gz and bzip2 (specially if you use flags like -9 or -9e ... info available in the manpage), the sad thing is that it is slow. More recently I discovered one that is even better, ZStd, with the flags "--ultra -22" it compresses the files faster than xz and uncompresses WAY quicker. I haven't benchmarked xz and zstd but I managed to get amazing compression and even better speed with zstd. So you could add the tar cvJf for .tar.xz (J on tar is the parameter -6 on the xz algorithm) or create your own version of .tar.zst by piping ... `tar cf - * | zstd --compress --ultra --threads=0 -22 > NAME.tar.zst` Archlinux is using the zstd algorithm on the newer packages right now Now a question because I wasn't able to figure out ... Is it possible to have a "drag and drop" option in LF? Sometimes I'm sending a file to someone in a chat through the browser (or just uploading a file to a cloud storage) and a quicker way to do it would be to have in my clipboard to just "paste" into the upload. Keep up the awesome content Brodie! Your way of digging into stuff inspires me to learn more things as well!!!

[@BrodieRobertson]

I didn't pick those algorithms for any specific reason I just looked at what I commonly see on Linux but I'll check those out. You picked such a great time to ask about drag and drop in lf, come check out the newest video on the channel.

[@dagda825]

Or just use ranger.

[@user-qf2ti6jt9m]

15:31 you could just `map tr $trash-restore` and also read `lf -doc` more carefully (see line 217)

[@BrodieRobertson]

I'm aware that I can do that

[@dachd]

trash-cli is very sh!t, if you are also facing gvfs / filesystem unhadled crap with it, then you can use simple tool GIO with argument trash.

[@dachd]

cmd trash %gio trash $fx