rfd (Ruby on Files & Directories)

rfd is a terminal-based filesystem explorer, inspired by the legendary freesoft MS-DOS filer, "FD".

% gem install rfd

• Ruby 2.0 or newer
• NCurses with wide character support (ncursesw) recommended for best Unicode display

macOS comes with an older system ncurses that doesn't fully support Unicode. For proper Unicode box-drawing characters, install and link Homebrew's ncurses before installing the curses gem:

% brew install ncurses
% brew link --force ncurses
% gem install curses

Mac OS X Mountain Lion and newer, Ubuntu 13.04 and newer

Open up your terminal and type:

% rfd

You can also pass in a starting directory name, which defaults to ..

% rfd ~/src/rails

You can send commands to rfd by pressing some chars on your keyboard, just like Vim. If you're unfamiliar with this sort of command system, I recommend you to play with vimtutor before you go any further.

All available commands in rfd are defined as Ruby methods here. https://github.com/amatsuda/rfd/tree/master/lib/rfd/commands.rb

• <Enter>: cd into the directory where the cursor is on.
• <Delete> (or <Backspace> on your keyboard, probably?): Go up to the upper directory (cd ..).
• -: Get back to where you once belonged (popd).
• @: cd to a directory given via the command-line window.

• j: Move down.
• k: Move up.
• h: Move left. At the leftmost column, move to the right end column at the previous page.
• l: Move right. At the rightmost column, move to the left end column at the next page.

Some commands such as j or k take a number parameter called {count}. For passing a {count} parameter, just type in a number prior to the command. For example, 3j moves the cursor to 3 lines below, and 999k will take your cursor to 999 lines above.

• H: Move to the top of the current page.
• M: Move to the middle of the current page.
• L: Move to the bottom of the current page.

• ctrl-n, ctrl-f: Move to the top of the next page.
• ctrl-p, ctrl-b: Move to the top of the previous page.
• g: Move to the top of the first page.
• G: Move to the bottom of the last page.

You can find a file by typing the first letter of it immediately after the find commands.

• f{char}: Move to the next file / directory of which name starts with the given char.
• F{char}: Move to the previous file / directory of which name starts with the given char.
• n: Repeat the last f or F.

For commands like these that require a parameter string, type the parameter in the command line at the bottom of the screen, and press <Enter>.

• /: Grep the current directory with the given parameter. The parameter will be interpreted as Ruby Regexp (e.g. .*\.rb$).
• s: Sort files / directories in the current directory in the given order.
  • (none): by name
  • r : reverse order by name
  • s, S : order by file size
  • sr, Sr: reverse order by file size
  • t : order by mtime
  • tr : reverse order by mtime
  • c : order by ctime
  • cr : reverse order by ctime
  • u : order by atime
  • ur : reverse order by atime
  • e : order by extname
  • er : reverse order by extname

You can send a command to the file / directory on which the cursor is on. Or, you can send a command to multiple files / directories at once by marking them first. The mark is drawn as a * char on the left of each file / directory name.

• <Space>: Mark / unmark current file / directory.
• ctrl-a: Mark / unmark all file / directories in the current directory.

As stated above, you can send a command to one or more files / directories. In this document, the term "selected items" means "(the marked files / directories) || (the file / directory on which the cursor is on)".

• c: Copy selected items (cp).
• m: Move selected items (mv).
• d: Move selected items into the Trash.
• D: Delete selected items.
• r: Rename selected items. This command takes a sed-like argument separated by a /. For example, changing all .html files' extension to .html.erb could be done by \.html$/.html.erb.

y & p works just like Windows-c & Windows-v on explorer.exe.

• y: Yank selected items.
• p: Paste yanked items into the directory on which the cursor is, or into the current directory.

• t: Create a new file (touch).
• K: Creat a new directory (mkdir).
• S: Create new symlink to the current file / directory (ln -s).

• a: Change permission of selected items (chmod). Takes chmod-like argument such as g+w, 755.
• w: Change the owner of of selected items (chown). Takes chown-like argument such as alice, nobody:nobody.

• <Enter>: View current file with the system $VIEWER such as less.
• v: View current file with the system $VIEWER such as less.
• e: Edit current file with the system $EDITOR such as vim.
• o: Send the open command.

• u: Unarchive .zip, .gz, or .tar.gz file into the current directory.
• z: Archive selected items into a .zip file with the given name.

You can cd into a .zip file as if it's just a directory, then unarchive selected items, view files in it, and even create new files or edit files in the archive.

• ctrl-w: Change the window split size to the {count} value (e.g. 4<C-w> to split the window into 4 columns). The default number of columns is 2.

Mouse is available if your terminal supports it. You can move the cursor by clicking on a file / directory. Double clicking on a file / directory is equivalent to pressing <Enter> on it.

• ctrl-l: Refresh the whole screen.
• C: Copy selected items' paths to the clipboard.
• O: Open a new terminal window at the current directory.
• !: Execute a shell command.
• q: Quit the app.

By pressing :, you can enter the command-line mode. Any string given in the command line after : will be executed as Ruby method call in the Controller instance. For instance, :j brings your cursor down, :mkdir foo makes a directory named "foo". And :q! of course works as you might expect, since q! method is implemented so.

Send me your pull requests here. https://github.com/amatsuda/rfd