Tfman - text file manager, much different then others

Question

Tfman - text file manager.
Performs operations on files through textual representation of file system.
Textual representation is in the form of plain text, editable with any text
editor and may contain multiple operations of every kind. Tfman can be
used from command-line or from within Vim as multi-window file manager.
It can be combined with tools like Sed or Awk.
. written in C fo Unix-like operating systems
. no dependencies (except gcc/clang and GNU Make for building)
Features in short:
   - scan filesystem to create its textual representation
   - parse textual representation and perform retrieved operations
   - use favorite text editing tool to edit textual representation
   - scan, edit and parse in one step
   - use Tfman from command-line or from within Vim as multi-window file manager
   - integration with other decent text editors should be easy
   - available: brace expansion, globbing, entries grouping, whole directory operations and more
Project's homepage:
https://chiselapp.com/user/machel/repository/tfman/home
Installation procedure (AUR or sources tarball) - see Project's homepage
Documentation, sources, report issue - see Project's homepage
Warning:
   Tfman is in an early state, it didn't receive sufficient testing yet. Please
   be carefull when manipulating sensitive data with it.
Note:
   I do not know any file manager that manipulates file system in similar way.
   Therefore usefulness of this kind of approach is not proven.
   Help me prove it.
Screenshots:
Screenshot1
New version pushed to AUR:
- changing entry ownership and permissions now associated under one action tag
- few other action tags changed
- Quick Start Guide now available, see Project's homepage
- bug fixes
Last edited by machel (2014-07-15 11:48:48)

Answer 1

machel wrote:I know it looks complex, but I believe it is not as complex as it seems to be although
not as simple as I want it to be. Any ideas how to make it simpler are highly appreciated.
Well, for start: Is there really a reason to use different character for directory and its subdirectories? As far as I can tell, you could just use '%' for all directories and decide what is top-level directory and what is subdirectory based on the indentation. Also, it would be nice to reserve '#' for comments, as it is common in many languages.
machel wrote:2) Use action tags to specify operations. They apply to single entries, groups of entries or whole directories
Here the complexity begins. There is 13 operations, if I counted it correctly in the man page. To be fair, some of them are just adding '*' enforce overwrites. Fine, that leaves us with about 9 operations to learn. I could probably do that But it would be better if it was less... Would it be possible to simplify operations that don't affect file location by allowing user to simply change the value in the text representation? It would probably require some kind of header (or some clever trickery), because the order of columns is not fixed, but it might be worth the trouble. You could also extend this to changing file times and perhaps other properties (those from '-F proper'). The linking and moving operators look good, with little exception of '))' - that just looks odd to me But that is definitely my personal taste... I'd prefer something like single '>'.
machel wrote:3) Entry names and action operands - I believe using them is quite intuitive:
Name relative to directory/subdirectory above:
  'name'
If you want absolute name:
  '/name'
If you want name relative to current working directory (where Tfman was invoked):
  './name'
No problem with this, I like that.
machel wrote:
dolik.rce wrote:ability to execute commands on the files/directories
What do you mean? Shell commands?
Shell commands would be best, but generally just ability to execute command with given file/directory as input or parameter. Example usage would be something like this:
# Dir
file1 ^ sed -i -e 'some sed script here' becomes: sed -i -e 'some sed script here' < file1
file2 ^% touch % becomes: touch file2
The syntax is just an example, but in this case ^ would feed the file into the standard input of the command, and '^%' would replace '%' in commandline with the actual file name. For globing, command gets executed for each matching file.
machel wrote:
dolik.rce wrote:execute some actions conditionally
Interesting idea. I must think about it.
Tfman already have tags to stop parsing file, stop parsing line and goto next,
disable whole dir/group or single entry, exclude entry from under directory/group,
perform action on previous action's target, ignore errors.
But it works unconditionally.
I can imagine wanting to do something based on the properties of file or even based on output of external command. E.g. 'move file only if it's older then N days', or 'ask remote server if it has file X, move the file to directory upload/ when the command returns non-zero exit status'
machel wrote:--- Tfm ---
Remember about 'tfm' utility which is simple Tfman wrapper  scanning given directory,
opening it in editor defined in EDITOR shell variable (Vim is default) and parsing
result after you save and quit.
It just compress 3 steps into 1.
This is definitely handy, and probably only reasonable way to use tfman interactively. However, I'm not a vim-person - as I already said I'm lazy to remember anything, so you can imagine that learning enough vim commands to use it effectively would be a nightmare for me The same goes for tfmvi, I'm just not the target audience for that. But my EDITOR variable is usually set to nano, so I could easily use it with that, probably just with slightly more typing.