Currently I am using fedora silverblue. and i am planning on trying and setting up nixos on a vm one thing i am failing to understand is how do move my config file in and out of the vm when i am figuring things out? is there an easy way? am i using git? or removable disks? I was planning on using gnome boxes but if there is a better vm platform please let me know too
I started using helix and fell in love with it. Multiple cursors, built in LSP, tree sitter, the which key (chef's kiss) everything i want in one place. Just one ick no file manager no git UI no project wide search and replace. There are wacky workarounds to use all these using just keyboard shortcuts in the config file or using some weird mental gymnastics spaghetti of multiplexers and scripts but it left behind some weird artifacts that I didn't like. I tried Yazi which is the most compatible among all TUI file managers but it's not really my type of file manager I just need a simple tree man. Anyhow yazelix was too much for me I ain't getting into nix man.
I kept editor hopping for like a whole year waiting patiently for a file manager or the plugin system which I heard is still a year or so away. Recently I started learning rust and I wanted a clean minimal editor to code in. But I really dislike GUI editors now after getting a taste of neovim/helix they feel clunky yes even zed even with all the keybind supports. And something about helix keybinds the batteries included approach I just cant go back even to neovim. And I tried to compile mattwparas's steel repo but for some reason even inside toolbox it fails to compile (I use silverblue) if I was successful in doing that the story would have ended there but here we are. Anyways jokes aside I could have just forked it and created an github workflow to get the binary but meh.
I don't know rust. Like at all. But I had opencode go wired up to deepseek v4 pro so I spent about $15 in api credits arguing with a LLM for like 6 hours until it spat out something that works.
abaran a TUI file manager wrapper for helix. You browse a file tree, hit enter, and it opens the file in helix running in the background. Ctrl + g drops you into gitui. Ctrl + s into scooter for find and replace. Technically you don't need any of these three tools to be installed to use the file manager. Its all pty forwarding under the hood (or at least that's what I have been told I have no idea what any of these means) so the tools feel native. Basically I just asked it to create a multiplexer + file manager with persistent tabs and when ever you press enter on a file it pipes it into helix using :open and :redraw to fix the weird issues all the three apps are their own tabs so they are persistent unless you close them using their own keybind/command if you use the toggle keybinds in abaran they are persistent. No tmux/zellij I just didn't want this overhead am happy with just ghostty.
Will upload screenshot/vhs sometime tomorrow. If you like the idea and or get why I did what I did give it a try. It's like 2AM here right now am logging off.
Disclosure every line of code in this repo was written by AI. I was just the guy saying that's still broken over and over. I can't review PRs because I literally cannot read rust. If something breaks sorry open an issue and I'll ask the clanker to fix it same if you have any feature request.