gls

It’s ls + du + tree with interactive TUI on your terminal! gls is created to easily view, filter and search your files, folders and directories with their size whenever you need to open up some storage space. It wouldn’t be wrong to say that gls is a minimal yet powerful file manager CLI tool.

Table of Contents

• Installation
• Usage
  • Default usage (TUI)
  • Text mode
• Features
  • TUI shortcuts
  • Configuration
  • Command line arguments
• How to Contribute

Installation

From Go package

Simply run:

go install go.sazak.io/gls/cmd/gls@latest

From Source Code

Installing gls on your machine with the source code is pretty simple: just clone the repo and install cmd/gls/main.go:

$ git clone https://github.com/ozansz/gls
$ cd gls
$ go install ./cmd/gls/main.go

After you run go install command, an executable file name gls is created in $GOPATH/bin. Now, you can simply run gls in terminal:

$ gls

For Ubuntu/Debian and derivatives

If you use a Debian-based distro on Linux, you can download the package which seems like gls_<VERSION_NUMBER>_amd64.deb from Releases page. Then, you can install it

• via a package management software with GUI by clicking on the package if you use desktop environment
• or from the terminal, type sudo dpkg -i gls_<VERSION_NUMBER>_amd64.deb in the directory where you downloaded the package.

For Windows

You can apply the similar procedure in PowerShell shown in the From Source Code section:

> git clone https://github.com/ozansz/gls
> cd .\gls\
> go install -v .\cmd\gls\main.go

Now, you can use gls in all directories.

Usage

There are two running modes of gls: TUI and text-based.

The TUI mode is interactive and you will be able to use all of the features of gls, such as searching by text/regular expression, traversing on the file tree, creating/opening/deleting files and many other things, until you close the program.

The text mode however, is fairly simple and is a literal combination of running tree and du altogether, with some additional features.

Default usage (TUI)

The command below runs gls with TUI, which is the default mode. It parses the file tree under the specified path along with the file and folder sizes on disk, then shows the tree view of the parsed tree.

gls -path ~/Downloads

Text mode

The command below does the same parsing process as the command above does. Except, this one just dumps the parsed tree as a the tree command does with the file/folder sizes and permissions, to the terminal.

gls -nogui -path ~/Documents

Features

gls includes (and still continues to include more) several features that mimic a normal file manager:

• List the files and folders under the specified path, in tree view
• Show current file info: size on disk, permissions, path, MIME type and last modification
• Sort the tree by the size on disk
• Search files/folders by name, using both plaintext and regular expressions
• Ignore specific files/folders by using regular expressions, similar to .gitignore style
  • Default ignore file is .glsignore, but infinitely many other ignore files can be specified through the CLI arguments
• Open files and folders by default programs or executables that you specify
• Copy/paste and move files and folders
• Remove files
• Create (similar to touch) and open files to edit
• Walk on the file tree, collapse and expand nodes easily

TUI shortcuts

Shortcut	Command	Description
q, ESC, ˆC	quit	Exits the program
c	collapse	Collapses all nodes in the file tree view
e	expand	Expands all nodes in the file tree view
s	search	Opens modal to search nodes (files and folders) by name
r	regex search	Same as search, but you can search using regular expressions
x	restore	Loads the original file tree view, mostly used after search and regex search
o	open	Opens the selected (on hover) file/folder with the default program
p	open	Opens modal to specify the executable path which will be used to open the selected (on hover) file/folder
BACKSPACE , DEL	remove	Removes the selected (on hover) file. Folder removal is currently not supported
m	mark	Marks/unmarks the selected (on hover) file or folder. Marked nodes can be used later for duplicate and move
u	unmark	Unmarks all the marked files and folders
n	new	Create a new file
d	duplicate	Copy/pastes the marked files and folders to a specified destination. The destination is specified by the text input of the opened form.
v	open file in vim	Opens file in VIM editor.
TAB, SPACE, ENTER	toggle expand node	Expands the node if currently collapsed, and vice versa, the selected (on hover) file or folder
ARROW KEYS, SCROLL	navigate	Navigates between nodes in the file tree view

Configuration

You can freely change the key bindings and shortcuts or configure the program for your needs from gui/core.go .

After your changes, run

go build cmd/gls/main.go

in the project directory.

In addition, if you think that your configurations or other changes seem necessary to improve the project, your contributions will be welcomed :)

Customize color palette

You can customize the color palette with .glsrc file. The only thing you need to do is create a .glsrc file in $HOME directory and set the colors as key-value pairs. An example is below:

GridTitleColor=blue
TreeViewTitleColor=yellow
FileInfoTitleColor=lightgreen
DirectoryColor=red
BorderColor=white
FileInfoAttrColor=orange
FileInfoValueColor=pink
SearchFormTitleColor=brown
UnmarkedFileColor=deeppink
MarkedFileColor=gray
FileInfoTabAttrWidth=30

When you run the program, the color palette values are overridden with values in .glsrc file. The file must be stored in $HOME directory and the file name must be .glsrc. Otherwise, the program uses the default color palette values.

Command line arguments

-debug
    	Increase log verbosity
-fmt string
   		size formatter, one of bytes, pow10 or none (default "bytes")
-ignore string
    	Comma-separated ignore files that specify which files folders to exclude
-nogui
    	text-only mode
-path string
    	path to run on (required)
-sort
    	sort nodes by size (default true)
-thresh string
    	size filter threshold, e.g. 10M, 100K, etc.

You can also read this section from terminal by using gls without parameters.

How to Contribute

You are very welcome to contribute to gls! Here are a few steps to guide you how to start contributing:

1. Check the open issues tab to see if there are any issue you may be interested in fixing. You can also list the issues with only the good-first-issue tag

2. Check the contributing guide for more explanation on setting up the development environment, opening the PR, etc.