Feedback on shortcuts

[maximbaz]

I decided to take a closer look at built-in shortcuts and play with customizing them, thought I'd give you some feedback 🙂

1. The "delete" shortcuts imho are unnecessarily noisy and complicated 🤔

For dd I honestly simply see no usefulness, for me rmdir chokes on "directory not empty" all the time, I dont know when I'm supposed to use this shortcut, only if I pay attention to not select folders?...

dD is a bit noisy for my taste, removing a simple directory results in pages of output of all it's contents...

Are you using both shortcuts? I realize it's probably a matter of taste, but I'd look into making making output less noisy, and for myself I will map dd do rmtrash -rf and dD do rm -rf, so that both at least remove without choking what I tell them to remove, but one moves it to trash and another purges instantly.

2. I thought to remap ctrl-a to a with the following hack, it does work, but a does not appear in the help menu. Am I stepping in the unsupported area here? 😅

remaps:
  a: ctrl-a
  V: null
  ctrl-a: null

Same for /, I wanted to remove ctrl-f so that in help I only see /, but this seems to also hide the shortcut entirely from help:

ctrl-f: null

It's probably because you have a notion of "primary shortcut" and "alias", but ideally as a user I'd not worry what is a main shortcut and what is an alias... but at least let's make it consistent, either prohibit me from doing this hack, or let's make sure the shortcut appears in the help.

3. For open in gui, I guess it all depends on user setup, so maybe don't change anything, but just FYI this seems to work perfectly well for me:

v:
  help: open in gui
  messages:
    - BashExecSilently: |
        while IFS= read -r line; do xdg-open "${line:?}" >/dev/null 2>&1; done < "${XPLR_PIPE_RESULT_OUT:?}"

(recently I've been burned by the fact that &> was buggy and in some environments not 100% equal to > .. 2>&1 so now I'm always using the latter one 😅 )

4. All in all I see a tendency in myself to remap keys to something more reachable, for example from day one I remapped :e to e (one less shortcut made me feel better), now I'm 100% remapping gx to v (thinking to avoid x in case my nnn muscle memory will confuse it with delete, so choosing between p and v for preview), remapping ctrl+a to simply a, removing ctrl+f mapping since I have /. Create, copy and move I haven't really used yet, but it feels like in my taste they belong to c, y and p in default mode.

5. This mapping I also added almost since day one, very useful for me, because arrow keys are too far off 😄

search:
  key_bindings:
    remaps:
      tab: right

6. For next/prev visited path, still trying to get used to this feature, so not sure yet if I'll be searching for different shortcuts or unmapping them altogether 🤔

7. I will eventually get to debugging logs, I dont know why yet, but :l flashes some screen which closes instantly, but at the same time ? works correctly, so there must be some difference or bug somewhere...

Enough for now! 😁

[sayanarijit]

Are you using both shortcuts? I realize it's probably a matter of taste, but I'd look into making making output less noisy, and for myself I will map dd do rmtrash -rf and dD do rm -rf, so that both at least remove without choking what I tell them to remove, but one moves it to trash and another purges instantly.

Unfortunately, I could not find any trashing utility that comes in-built in all the platforms and behaves the same way. If you go through the built-in commands, you will notice that I try to keep the use of "non-native" bash commands as little as possible. It can be argued that in platforms like NetBSD, even bash isn't "native", but in that case, bash will be the only dependency you will need to install (I don't want my scripts to run in sh). The bottom line is that - I wasn't able to come up with a cross-platform, out of the box rmtrash alternative.

dd -> rmdir mapping for directory is simply to provide a consistent behavior, so users know what to expect when they run dd on a file or directory. Like "Deleting a single item? Use dd. Deleting recursively? Use dD". The script is written in a way that, when dd isn't able to delete nonempty directories, they are still selected so that you can then try dD. I mainly use xplr as netrw replacement from inside neovim, so the rmdir mapping sometimes come in handy when I create a directory and then want to delete it after realizing I could name it better. I don't have to get cautious I like I do to when running dD.

The verbosity is more of a personal preference. For me, I like watching what's happening when I'm executing some command. It would be nice if it supported progress bars, but -v is all we get.

However, these mapping are meant to be overwritten based on your preference, platform, what tools you use and how you use xplr. The main reason these aren't implemented natively into xplr in rust.

When we implement plugin support I think things will get better, and we'll be able to achieve more cross-platform way of doing things with more control.

thought to remap ctrl-a to a with the following hack, it does work, but a does not appear in the help menu. Am I stepping in the unsupported area here?

Yes 😄 "Un"mapping isn't supported as of now because remap works like symlink to existing mappings. In your example, the resolved mapping looks like a -> ctrl-a -> null i.e. a resolves to null. But I think we can "fix" this by using indexmap and "copying" the target action instead of "linking" to it. Same for /.

For open in gui, I guess it all depends on user setup, so maybe don't change anything, but just FYI this seems to work perfectly well for me:

For me, I often open files while selecting to determine if I should select it or not. So I'd want gx to open the file under focus, not the selected ones. Also, it might be useful to open multiple files in different tabs of a program like an editor, but I'm not sure when it makes sense to open multiple files in different windows.

ecently I've been burned by the fact that &> was buggy and in some environments not 100% equal to > .. 2>&1 so now I'm always using the latter one

Good suggestion 👍 I didn't know they're different.

All in all I see a tendency in myself to remap keys to something more reachable, for example from day one I remapped :e to e (one less shortcut made me feel better), now I'm 100% remapping gx to v (thinking to avoid x in case my nnn muscle memory will confuse it with delete, so choosing between p and v for preview), remapping ctrl+a to simply a, removing ctrl+f mapping since I have /. Create, copy and move I haven't really used yet, but it feels like in my taste they belong to c, y and p in default mode.

The primary goal of the default key bindings is to demonstrate what's possible, and the goal of xplr config system it to help you customize it according to your preference with the least possible effort. I plan to include key bindings from emacs, nnn, vifm, ranger, etc. as hacks or plugins once the API stabilizes, so that you can feel at home with xplr no matter where you come from.

This mapping I also added almost since day one, very useful for me, because arrow keys are too far off

tab in search mode now maps to select to let you select files while searching (like fzf). I think ctrl-n and ctrl-p where nice additions to the search mode by @aflyingpumpkin that help you navigate vertically. I'm trying to figure out sensible horizontal navigation keys.

For next/prev visited path, still trying to get used to this feature, so not sure yet if I'll be searching for different shortcuts or unmapping them altogether

I often use it to copy files to a destination and get back to the previous location. Also, when visiting a symlink and get back to the previous directory. But I guess we can make it "jump list" like in vim to make it more useful. It will help us navigate the history of jumps even in the same directory.

I will eventually get to debugging logs, I dont know why yet, but :l flashes some screen which closes instantly, but at the same time ? works correctly, so there must be some difference or bug somewhere...

Weird! Try cat $XPLR_PIPE_LOGS_OUT | ${PAGER:-less} in the terminal.

[sayanarijit]

Anyway, I'll leave it as it is. Preview probably should be a separate action.

[sayanarijit]

Nope. The go to mode actions handle only the cursor operations. multi-open should be sx.

[maximbaz]

On a related note, is it possible for me to delete the file and preserve the cursor location, instead of it going to the top? A general case with multiple selection need some thought on how to do it properly, but in summary I'm imagining like vim, I am going through the directory, and what I dont like I just dd right away (I'm making my dd silent, not printing any output nor waiting for enter).

[sayanarijit]

Should be possible. But it doesn't work for some reason. Need to debug with some dedicated time.

[sayanarijit]

Basically 'FocusNext' needs to work after delete.

[maximbaz]

Another related idea, that I'm not sure if is a good one or not: what if in the help menu we would sort the entries not by shortcut, but by description?

[sayanarijit]

I wanted to sort them by the definition order. i.e. use a IndexMap. But then I need to reorganize the existing keys with an order that makes sense. Seems lot of work:sweat_smile: but what do think about this?

[maximbaz]

Definition order would also need to figure out how to treat new user-defined keys and remaps (especially complicated ones, like a->b, b->c, c->null 🤔 Maybe don't go that road 😅

The current order is helpful when you dont know what a key does (e.g. I know d does something, but I dont remember what, so thanks to sorted order by key I can quickly find it and read the description), but for me at least more often I dont know key combination for a function (e.g. I know there must be a "delete" feature, but I dont remember the key), that's why I thought sorting by descriptions could help with that...

[sayanarijit]

Ah, right... #151

[maximbaz]

Historically terminals couldn't distinguish certain shortcuts (e.g. ctrl-i and tab, or ctrl+j and enter), and although this is being fixed now in modern terminals, I was surprised to discover that xplr already can distinguish ctrl+j and enter - but not ctrl+i and tab! How come?

kakoune had to implement support for this new keyboard mode, I haven't looked deeply in xplr, but I presume you use some library for this? Would be real nice to track this, to be able to support wider range of shortcuts.

[sayanarijit]

I use crossterm. Not sure if ctrl-i and tab are distinguishable because kakoune and vim both seems to respond to ctrl-i and tab the same way.

[maximbaz]

OK interesting, I'll open a thread there, lets see what they say. ctri-i and tab will be distinguishable in the future, it's just very new protocol, so in kakoune it's implemented in a branch, but not in latest release yet. I suspect neovim will have this support very soon too, if it doesnt have it already in some branch.

FYI the way it works is that in "default" mode yes ctrl-i and tab produce the same character (you can check this by running $ cat and pressing ctrl-i and tab), but with the new protocol your app can send a special escape code, and after that terminal will be sending more info about pressed keys, so with that extra info you will see the difference.

[maximbaz]

crossterm-rs/crossterm#569

[maximbaz]

Another idea to consider: remapping a key from one mode to another. For example I found myself remapping e => :e (to bring editor to default mode), or gj => G (to support kakoune's gj as go to the end). Right now I basically have to copy-paste the entire definition.

[maximbaz]

This could be interesting to explore! Any ideas for a specific language and examples / prototypes?

[sayanarijit]

So far 2 languages - lua and gluon. There's also rhai, but I'd prefer gluon if it has to be written in Rust. I'll create a prototype with both lua and gluon.

[sayanarijit]

Here's the lua binding: #156.

[sayanarijit]

gluon seems to be the difficult one even though it's written in rust. I couldn't find any serde integration like in lua.

[sayanarijit]

WIP gluon experiment: #157