noice is a minimal file browser for those who don’t like to type
cd ...
to reach a file, then open it; or one who doesn’t like to open a file browser and keep clicking to find and open a file. noice reduces the effort to pressing the arrow keys. Originally noice is written as a utility having minimal interactions with X. For example, image files are opened with feh
. Considering most people use X and love to use to GUI apps when it makes sense, I have forked a branch with some changes of my own.
For example, instead of opening unrecognized files with less
, it makes more sense to open files with xdg-open
on Ubuntu or gnome-open
in the Gnome environment. Let’s face it, when you select a file, you want it to be opened or played in the player of your choice. That’s what xdg-open
and its friends do for you.
In its current status, noice is mostly about fast navigation and opening files. So I made it more mime friendly by introducing the option to use xdg-open
and family. However, note that you can open the shell anytime within the current directory for advanced operations.
noice features
- Browse current or specified directory
- Navigate to parent or child directories
- Jump to first or last entry
- Open files with default-associated programs
- Jump to home directory
- Filter contents in current directory
- Show/hide hidden files
- Sort entries by time modified
- Spawn a shell in current directory
- Run
top
- Open a file with
vim
orless
You can find the original development of branch here.
My modifications
- Behaviour
- Case-insensitive alphabetic content listing instead of upper case first.
- File associations
- Environment variable
NOICE_OPENER
to override all associations and open all files with your desktop environments default file opener. Examples:export NOICE_OPENER=xdg-open export NOICE_OPENER=gnome-open export NOICE_OPENER=gvfs-open
All the following associations are ignored if
NOICE_OPENER
is exported.- Associate plain text files with vim (using
file
command) - Remove video file associations (to each his own favourite video player)
- Associate common audio file types with lightweight fmedia
- Associate PDF files with zathura
- Removed less
- Use environment variable
NOICE_FALLBACK_OPENER
to open other non-associated files
- Environment variable
- Compilation
- Use
-O3
for compilation, fixed warnings - Added compilation flag
-march=native
(compile only, no plans to package). - Remove generated config.h on
make clean
.
- Use
Installation
To install my fork of noice, either clone the branch:
$ git clone https://github.com/jarun/noice
or download the latest zip package.
You must compile it on the machine you want to run it on. There are certain optimizations that wouldn’t work otherwise. I don’t have any plans to release any generic packages either. You need gcc and the development package of libncurses.
To compile and install noice, run:
$ make
$ make install
Usage
Start with the man page for shortcuts:
$ man noice
As you’ll notice, you’ll need only the arrow keys for navigation and opening files. The current item is preceded by >
.
Export any of the following environment variables to set a generic mime handler as you need:
NOICE_OPENER
NOICE_FALLBAK_OPENER
To open the current directory in noice, run:
$ noice
To open a directory in noice, run:
$ noice path_to_dir
To quit, press q
, to search for contents in the current directory matching a string, press /
.
noice is extremely hackable, refer to the project readme on how to set your own custom file type associations.
On GitHub: noice
liked ranger more!! 🙂
Ranger has more features, no doubt. noice is faster and only has a subset of those features which I prefer.