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Show HN: Projectable - a TUI file manager built for projects (github.com)
49 points by dzfrias 1095 days ago
8 comments

This is one of the first applications I've made that's actually usable. I'd love your feedback, positive or negative! You can read more about the motivations/highlights of the project on my blog (at https://dzfrias.dev/blog/projectable).
A word of advice if I may. The first paragraph on the page says “(…) You can do everything your project needs from a comfortable and smooth interface.”

Generally, overpromising is best avoided. The reader may be thinking completely differently from yourself when you wrote that the project can do “everything”.

Can it keep track of invoices? Staffing? Timelines? Can it track my cloud expenses? Perhaps those things fall under “project management” for your reader.

I recommend being more specific in what the tool does in these first paragraphs.

Good point, thanks for the advice. Perhaps "project management" is a bit misleading as well... maybe I'll just stick to "TUI file manager". Hopefully marketing it as more of a file manager for a project as opposed to a full-on project manager promises less.

I'll update the README soon.

That’s a good idea, I think there is more agreement on a file manager does.

Then you can explain what you find most exciting about the program, what it does best or what’s unique about it.

I see a lot of TUI and rich-console applications that don’t require high performance are written in Rust lately, does it have especially good libraries for that, or is the ease of distribution the deciding factor to prefer it over scripting languages?
Rust has great libraries for TUIs. tui-rs (https://github.com/fdehau/tui-rs) has been used in numerous popular applications, but is unmaintained. ratatui (https://github.com/tui-rs-revival/ratatui) is the maintained version, and is pretty new. Less widely known is cursive (https://github.com/gyscos/cursive), which I have yet to try.

Aside from the libraries, I just wanted to start a project that would make be better at Rust. The easy distribution with cargo is a huge bonus though.

`broot` (https://github.com/Canop/broot) is another file manager with a curious interface that seems to fill a similar niche.

Of course, there are many other file managers to choose from (mc, ranger, nnn, lf, ....), but most of them don't show nested subdirectories by default.

I can dig this; eager to tinker with it later. There are a few options in this space (Broot being my favorite). The ability to define custom commands (as Broot does) is powerful. Will be watching this repo; thank you for Projectable and best of luck to ya.
I imagine most people who live in the terminal are using their editor's file manager for this. How does this compare to neovim+nvim_tree for example? Seems like a subset of what a modern neovim setup can do.
That's absolutely true for people who want to interact with their projects using their editors exclusively! Personally, I like using both my shell and neovim for stuff like this, and I felt like there was no great option for me on the shell-end of things.

The usefulness of a tool like this is definitely completely dependent on a person's workflow.

Yea, neovim + telescope + neotree pretty much replaces this, from the first glance.
Being able to quickly inspect your project structure from CLI is certainly very nice. Previously always relies on tools like VSCode.

Let's play with this...

Have you considered adding a feature that scans source files for TODO/FIXME/XXX/etc comments?