I've been a professional C, Perl, PHP and Python developer.
I'm an ex-sysadmin from the late 20th century.
These days I do more Javascript and CSS and whatnot, and promote UX and accessibility.
I've tried using terminal file managers a few times and they rarely have a use case for me. I prefer to explicitly move, copy and rename manually from the command line - it means I have a history of what I did and I can script things.
I do use GUI file managers though, so I'm not sure where the cut-off point of usefulness/trickiness lies for me. Something about the mouse, maybe.
With TUI file managers, there's a learning curve, including expectations and side-effects. Does "D" delete or make a directory? If I forget, do I need to restore from backups? If I want to change the permissions on all the files with ".sh" as an extension, how easy is that? As soon as I find a single thing that's easier to accomplish by dropping to a shell prompt anyway, I abandon the TUI.
Smiling person, father of two, Husband, Senior Developer/Architect (in that exact order, it's important)
Experience in development since 2004
Linux user and advocate since 2001
I've been a professional C, Perl, PHP and Python developer.
I'm an ex-sysadmin from the late 20th century.
These days I do more Javascript and CSS and whatnot, and promote UX and accessibility.
I've gone ahead and installed yazi and it's surprisingly simple compared to the TUI file managers I've used in the past. I might end up using it, even if just for the simple image previews.
Smiling person, father of two, Husband, Senior Developer/Architect (in that exact order, it's important)
Experience in development since 2004
Linux user and advocate since 2001
I've tried using terminal file managers a few times and they rarely have a use case for me. I prefer to explicitly move, copy and rename manually from the command line - it means I have a history of what I did and I can script things.
I do use GUI file managers though, so I'm not sure where the cut-off point of usefulness/trickiness lies for me. Something about the mouse, maybe.
With TUI file managers, there's a learning curve, including expectations and side-effects. Does "D" delete or make a directory? If I forget, do I need to restore from backups? If I want to change the permissions on all the files with ".sh" as an extension, how easy is that? As soon as I find a single thing that's easier to accomplish by dropping to a shell prompt anyway, I abandon the TUI.
I agree with you. My ideas was not to promote everyone should use a terminal file managers.
It's more about talking such a thing exists.I was surprised by the quality of yazi tool I just discovered. So, I tought I could make an article.
As with any other tools, the best tool is the one you know, the one you are used to use.
Sometimes, it's good to face new things to check if there is nothing new that could solve an issue, or something we dislike with previous tool.
I've gone ahead and installed yazi and it's surprisingly simple compared to the TUI file managers I've used in the past. I might end up using it, even if just for the simple image previews.
I'm happy my article helped you to try something new