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Terminal Explorer

Bring file manager's copy/paste to the CLI

💡 About

Terminal explorer is a files manager tool written in portable sh that mimics the way GUI's file manager do copy/cut/paste.

✨ Features

• Minimum: with exactly 269 lines of sh and minimum dependencies.
• Register: you can operate in any specific register.
• Smart cut: after cutting the file to a new path, the file's new path will be automatically copied for future operation.
• Customizable: you can change the commands to set/get the clipboard, commands to copy/cut files, see more here.

🚀 Setup

🧾 Dependencies

• Unix commands to process
• A clipboard managers like:
  • clipb clipboard managers warper
  • wl-clipboard for Wayland
  • xclip or xsel for X.org

📥 Installation

🔧 Manually

Option 1: using curl

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/NNBnh/terminal-explorer/main/bin/te > ~/.local/bin/te
chmod +x ~/.local/bin/te

Option 2: using git

git clone https://github.com/NNBnh/terminal-explorer.git ~/.local/share/terminal-explorer
ln -s ~/.local/share/terminal-explorer/bin/te ~/.local/bin/te

📦 Package manager

For Bpkg user:

bpkg install NNBnh/terminal-explorer

For Basher user:

basher install NNBnh/terminal-explorer

Note If you can and want to port Terminal explorer to other package managers, feel free to do so.

⌨️ Usage

Run te in the terminal:

te ACTION[REGISTER] FILES

or:

te PASTE[REGISTER] [COMMAND]

ACTION:
  c, y          copy FILES into REGISTER's clipboard and set paste's action to copy
  x, d          copy FILES into REGISTER's clipboard and set paste's action to cut
  l, s          copy FILES into REGISTER's clipboard and set paste's action to symlink
  h             copy FILES into REGISTER's clipboard and set paste's action to hardlink

PASTE:
  v, V, p, P    paste FILES from REGISTER's clipboard, using custom COMMAND if defined
  C, Y          ignore paste's action, copy     FILES from REGISTER's clipboard
  X, D          ignore paste's action, cut      FILES from REGISTER's clipboard
  L, S          ignore paste's action, symlink  FILES from REGISTER's clipboard
  H             ignore paste's action, hardlink FILES from REGISTER's clipboard

REGISTER if leave empty will use system clipboard,
otherwise it's name can be anything that doesn't include '/'.

Examples:

~/
├─ 1/
├─ 2/
├─ foo
└─ bar

cd ~/
te x foo      # Cut foo
te ctest bar  # Copy bar to 'test' register

cd ~/1/
te p      # Paste foo then copy ~/1/foo
te ptest  # Paste bar from 'test' register
te ptest  # Paste bar from 'test' register again

cd ~/2/
te p # Paste foo from ~/1/foo

Result:

~/
├─ 1/
│ ├─ foo
│ ├─ bar
│ └─ bar (2)
│
├─ 2/
│ └─ foo
│
└─ bar

⚙️ Configuration

Terminal explorer is configured through environment variables: export TERMINALEXPLORER_<SETTING>="<value>"

Value	Validity	Default	Description
TERMINALEXPLORER_CLIPBOARD_SET_COMMAND	<commands>	clipb copy	Command to set the clipboard
TERMINALEXPLORER_CLIPBOARD_GET_COMMAND	<commands>	clipb paste	Command to get the clipboard
TERMINALEXPLORER_COPY_COMMAND	<commands>	cp	Command to copy files
TERMINALEXPLORER_CUT_COMMAND	<commands>	mv	Command to cut files
TERMINALEXPLORER_TEMPORARY	<path/to/file>	/tmp/terminal-explorer	Temporary file's location

Examples:

export TERMINALEXPLORER_CLIPBOARD_SET_COMMAND='xclip -in -selection clipboard'
export TERMINALEXPLORER_CLIPBOARD_GET_COMMAND='xclip -out -selection clipboard'
export TERMINALEXPLORER_COPY_COMMAND='rsync --recursive --archive -hh --partial --info=stats1 --info=progress2 --modify-window=1'
export TERMINALEXPLORER_CUT_COMMAND='rsync --recursive --archive -hh --partial --info=stats1 --info=progress2 --modify-window=1 --remove-source-files'

💌 Credits

Special thanks to:

• File URI Specification by Freedesktop.org
• SH-realpath by Michael Kropat

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Made with ❤️ by NNB