Is anyone building a file explorer with textual?

[marcbelmont]

I'm a long time user of Ranger (a file explorer written in Python), but development has stalled (last release is 3 years old) and a reboot using textual seems like a fun project.

I know very little about textual. I would love to get advice for how to architecture such a project and if it makes sense to use this library.
Is anyone working on a file explorer already?

[willmcgugan]

Our very own @darrenburns was building a file explorer with Textual.

https://github.com/darrenburns/kupo

[marcbelmont]

awesome, I'm checking it out.

update: it's not compatible with the textual main branch, and I couldn't figure out which one it's using. Editing a few lines here and there, I managed to run it, but it wasn't very functional. Anyway, it is similar to what I'm trying to build, and I'll look more into it.

[darrenburns]

There are two versions of it - I suspect you were running the old one. The newer stuff was in new_app.py which has way more stuff (opening files in editor, creating, copying, deleting (be careful 😄), multi selecting files). It's also unlikely to work on the latest version of Textual though.

[marcbelmont]

Yes, new_app + latest Textual has some issues. For example, Message seems to work differently now. But I quite like what you built so far!

[pbelange]

Hi! Jumping in as a long time user of Last File Manager (lfm). Same, very interested in a textual file explorer! It's a game changer, especially when working on remote machines from ssh. Any plans to maintain and make kupo into a main project of textual?

[darrenburns]

Hey - no there are no plans for that. It's using a very old version of Textual and I'd suspect I'd be more likely to rewrite it.

[pbelange]

Ok thanks. In any case, just letting you know there's interest! ;)

[huiyeruzhou]

Hi! I'm trying to read a log file and render it using textual, the app does similar things to what the textview does in editor. I'm using RichLog to implement it. What bothered me is that the app will stuck in syntax highlighting when I open a huge file (about 1000+ lines, a vesy sensible size to a detailed log), besides I have to flush the log area every 5 seconds to get the latest content. I have considered an increnmental policy but it may not work when the whole file is overwritten. I wonder if you have thought about these problem during write an editor, maybe you can share some idea and that will be very helpful ! Thank for any help in advance!

[davep]

@huiyeruzhou You may find https://github.com/Textualize/toolong of interest.

[huiyeruzhou]

嘿 - 不，没有这方面的计划。它使用的是非常旧的文本版本，我怀疑我更有可能重写它。

@huiyeruzhou您可能会发现感兴趣的https://github.com/Textualize/toolong 。

That's Cool! Thanks for recommending me such a great project!

[derVedro]

Not long ago, I stumbled upon rovr - a very fancy file explorer.

[kinthaiofficial]

Textual is actually a great fit for a file explorer — the built-in DirectoryTree widget gets you most of the way there, and the event system handles the interactive parts cleanly.

A minimal working file explorer:

from textual.app import App, ComposeResult
from textual.widgets import DirectoryTree, Header, Footer
from textual.binding import Binding

class FileExplorer(App):
    BINDINGS = [
        Binding("q", "quit", "Quit"),
        Binding("enter", "open_file", "Open"),
    ]
    
    def compose(self) -> ComposeResult:
        yield Header()
        yield DirectoryTree(".")
        yield Footer()
    
    def on_directory_tree_file_selected(
        self, event: DirectoryTree.FileSelected
    ) -> None:
        self.notify(f"Selected: {event.path}")
        # open in editor, preview in panel, etc.

Features worth adding:

Split pane with preview:

from textual.widgets import Static
from textual.containers import Horizontal

class FileExplorer(App):
    def compose(self) -> ComposeResult:
        with Horizontal():
            yield DirectoryTree(".", id="tree")
            yield Static("", id="preview")
    
    def on_directory_tree_file_selected(self, event):
        try:
            content = event.path.read_text()
            self.query_one("#preview").update(content[:2000])
        except Exception:
            self.query_one("#preview").update("[binary file]")

Keyboard navigation for vim users: bind j/k to scroll the tree, l to expand, h to collapse.

Filtering: add an Input widget that filters the tree by filename pattern using DirectoryTree.filter_paths.

Are you building this as a standalone tool or as a component within a larger TUI application?