Announcing ‘mini.files’

announce

Navigate and manipulate file system (with column view and editing text)

Author

Evgeni Chasnovski

Published

June 22, 2023

Hello, Neovim users!

I am thrilled to tell you about the release of mini.files - new module of mini.nvim to navigate and manipulate file system. It can also be installed using separate GitHub repository.

Writing a file explorer for Neovim was a dream goal of mine for almost a couple of years now. But I didn’t have any interesting ideas while popular alternatives worked OK. Until about a month ago a thought came to me: how about a combination of a column view for file navigation and a great approach of “manipulate files by editing text” (as in stevearc/oil.nvim)? And thus (after a full bucket of sweat and tears) the ‘mini.files’ module now starts the fourth decade of ‘mini.nvim’ modules.

Here are main features of ‘mini.files’:

Navigate file system using column view (Miller columns) to display nested directories. See *MiniFiles-navigation* tag in help file for overview.
Manipulate files and directories by editing text buffers: create, delete, copy, rename, move. See *MiniFiles-manipulation* tag in help file for overview.
Use as default file explorer instead of netrw.
Configurable:
- Filter/sort of file system entries.
- Mappings used for common explorer actions.
- UI options: whether to show preview of directory under cursor, etc.

See “Quick start” section of README for some quick start.

See *MiniFiles-examples* tag in help file for some common configuration examples.

Notes:

This module is written and thoroughly tested on Linux. Support for other platform/OS (like Windows or MacOS) is a goal, but there is no guarantee.
Works on all supported versions but using Neovim>=0.9 is recommended.

For more information, see help file.

Please, check it out and tell me what you think! You can leave your suggestions either here in comments or in dedicated beta-testing issue.

Thanks!