Type-ahead find
Type-ahead find
Type-ahead find is such an underrated feature that I don’t think people really paid attention to despite being from the file explorer of WindowsXP.
It lets you select a file by typing its initial characters. So far, the best GUI file managers implementing this are Thunar and Dolphin (I think even Windows Explorer has it). But Dolphin annoyingly added a “filtering” feature that made pressing a space an annoyance. This made me look into terminal file managers that I can set them precisely how I want without being affected by such annoying updates.
I don’t know why terminal file managers insist on vim keybindings. They could be
the best for editing text but not for navigating between files. This is like
using j,k to move up and down inkscape tools instead of just pressing p for
pen or t for text.
Workaround
Ranger almost has this feature, but you need to type f to enter
“find” mode. If there is a way to enable “find” mode in Ranger by default, this
will solve the problem.
I’m currently using lf, and the current workaround I figured was remapping of all keys
# Nav
map <a-h> updir
map <a-j> down
map <a-k> up
map <a-l> open
map <enter> open
map <space> :toggle
map <c-w> quit
map <f-2> rename
map q push :find<enter>q
map w push :find<enter>w
map e push :find<enter>e
map r push :find<enter>r
map t push :find<enter>t
map y push :find<enter>y
See also