TermFM

To many people eDEX-UI was simply seen as a joke UI, an experiment, or interactive art. But after watching a demonstration of it I saw something that piqued my interest. Namely the file manager that follows the terminal. It's one of the things that has sometimes irked me while looking for a file. The cd/ls/cd/ls/cd/ls loop quickly gets tedious. And opening my file manager, navigating to the folder I'm in, find the thing I was looking for, and then copying the path back is even worse. So I created this thing, TermFM, short for "Terminal File Manager". This is currently in a PoC state, and only supports the basic premise of the idea. Here is a YouTube video I recorded of how it works:

Setup

To make this work you need to add a little thing to you PS1:

store_dir() {
  xprop -id $WINDOWID -f _CUSTOM_FOLDER 8s -set _CUSTOM_FOLDER $(pwd)
}

PS1='$(store_dir)' # For bash, you probably want to append/prepend it to what you have already
PROMPT='$(store_dir)' # For zsh, same as above

Then you can simply run TermFM whenever you want:

termfm $WINDOWID &

As you can see the program takes in the X11 window ID to read the property of and direct the xdotool type command at. This obviously doesn't have to be the terminal that launches TermFM, so you could easily have a keyboard shortcut that just grabbed the current window (but maybe double check that it's actually a terminal).

TODO

Pretty much everything. Things that could be implemented, in no particular order:

• Scrolling
• Options for fonts/icons
• Support the various file type colours
• Some kind of check if the terminal is ready for input
• Clear whatever is on the terminal input line before typing
• Different icons for different files
• Image previews