I think pretty much all software developers have faced the situation where they get introduced to a new codebase — or some directory they don’t know that much — and they don’t really know their place around. The idea is that one would like to move to a specific folder, but does not remember exactly the path to it. Another situation is when someone wants to apply a command to a bunch of files, and a glob cannot really be used, like *.txt, because one would want only specific files — like {foo,bar}.txt for instance.

Most of the time, if you are a CLI/TUI enjoyer, you will likely have a similar workflow to this:

• ls to show the directories. You will locate the first directory you want to go to.
• cd <that-dir>.
• ls again to show what’s there.
• cd <another-dir>.
• Repeat until you are at the place you want.

I don’t think I need to debate on the fact that this is a very time-wasting workflow, and honestly not very pleasant. Most shells today allow you to do something like cd <tab> and have a way to virtually visit the directories, until you find the one you want. Press <return> and your command is completed. You can use the same method for tar-ing files, removing files, running arbitrary commands, etc.

Another interesting way of doing that is to use a fuzzy finder, like fzf or skim. I would usually just do cd ^t. That works when you know exactly what you are looking for, which is not exactly the situations we are talking about here.

The cd example is what motivated me to make a small tool that I named flirt, but along the way, I realized it could do much more interesting things, without expanding its scope and not violating the UNIX philosophy.

FiLe InteRacT, the file interaction tool for your CLI

I never liked file browsers, like nnn, lf or yazi. They look cool, but there is something too much about them. I like the Kakoune’s way. I think the UI from file browsers is interesting, but I think we could use it in a much more barebone/simple (and UNIX) way. The idea is to use it as a read-only UI, and let other tools compose around it.

For instance, let’s take the cd example from before, where we go to a directory by interleaving cd and ls commands. What do we want to actually do?

1. Locate a directory.
2. cd into it.

flirt allows to implement the first part. You can do something like cd $(flirt) — or cd ^s for a shell shortcut integration, which I highly recommend — and move around directories until you have found the one you are interested in. Quit flirt, and you have your CLI set to cd <path>. Just press <return> to jump to that directory.

This is a simple workflow, because it allows you to think of flirt just as a read-only view into your filesystem. But it can do much more.

Arbitrary files selection and reordering

flirt can select multiple files. Why would you want to select many files? Well, imagine that you want to select a bunch of files and put them in a directory. It’s a pretty cumbersome operation to do manually on the CLI, because you have to type a lot of text to just pick the files you want to feed your mv command. With flirt, you can do something like mv ^s and pick the files you want.

Because flirt is ordered — you can see the order on the right-side view and switch between the left and right views with the <tab> key by default — you can ensure the destination directory is the last argument — interactively.

Unlocking the full potential with other UNIX tools

Have you heard about moreutils? It’s a collection of UNIX tools that go a bit further in terms of composability. One of those tools, vipe, is a pipe editor: it reads from stdin and pipes its content to your $EDITOR. Once you have finished editing your buffer and quit your editor, it will pipe the modified data back into its stdout:

cmd1 | vipe | cmd2

Composing with flirt is super easy and you can implement interesting workflows, such as with:

flirt | vipe | sh

Which allows you to select a bunch of files on which operate commands — that you add in your editor, via vipe — and execute the output script!

If you are interested, you can find flirt here, along with some additional links:

• Discussion mailing list
• Development mailing list (send your patches here!)
• Feature requests / bug reports

If you have cargo installed, you can install flirt easily:

cargo install flirt

I might add a PKGBUILD for Archlinux at some point.

Do not hesitate to send your feedback on the discussion mailing list! Keep the vibes!