Using EZA to generate a full, dynamically generated tree with seach capabilities

[wytchblade]

Hello @A7Lavinraj, thank you for your work on developing the fyler plugin! I wanted to reach out because I have been working with EZA quite a bit and was wondering if there is a way to actually print the eza output to a neovim buffer, modify it in a way that can then be saved apropriately so that upon exit, the filesystem preserves the change? What I'm trying to achieve is the best of bnoth wor;ds (eza output, but the ability to modify the filesystem like an oil buffer), any tips on where I should look for working on the implementation?

[A7Lavinraj]

Hi @wytchblade. As far I understand is that you want to a plugin or custom lua module to work like oil.nvim but with eza style output. Unfortunately fyler.nvim doesn't support this type of customization yet and am not sure but I guess oil.nvim also doesn't supports this yet.

But if you want to you create something completely from scratch and want it to be solely dependent on eza cli then that will be a completely different story and need lots of research about:

• Acquiring shell command output.
• Showing on neovim buffer with correct highlights.
• Parsing and build a in memory tree from eza output.
• Calculation of differences between in memory tree state and the edited buffer state.
• Calculation of DAG to order operations and detect cycles.
• Safely execute operation with rollback on error.

Still there are lots of other hidden components that you can learn by reading oil.nvim and mini.files code base.

Hope that will be helpful!

[wytchblade]

Thanks for the insight, @A7Lavinraj! I will definitely have to look into those feature s (some of which i take for granted, like the error rollback mechanism).

For me, oil just works, but I always wanted to have some way of exploring the tree/filesystem with more traditional output that eza (and ls) commit to.

I'll have a look and see if there is some way we can implement this into fyler. Currently, i just use broot to expose my subdir trees, and broot has a very clean way of taking the current characters is a search box and dynamically filtering out matches, BUT it preserves the parent child connection, which is useful to see nested files deep in the filesystem.

I'll get back to you in a week if I can maange to make any progress!