From noice to nnn

Why fork?

nnn was initially forked from noice but is significantly different today. I chose to fork because:

• one can argue my approach deviates from the goal of the original project - keep the utility suckless. noice was rudimentary. In my opinion evolution is the taste of time.
• I would like to have a bit of control on what features are added in the name of desktop integration. A feature-bloat is the last thing in my mind. Check out the design considerations for more details.

v1.0 was released on 13 Apr, 2017.

The name

The name nnn is a recursive acronym from Nnn's Not Noice!, suggested by a longtime friend.

nnn vs. noice

The nnn toppings section below is outdated and not updated anymore. nnn is under active development and new capabilities are being added continuously. To have a more recent overview of the current features in nnn please visit the features list in the project homepage and the ToDo list.

Original (noice) features

• Super-easy navigation
• Pre-defined associations for different file types
• Jump to home directory
• Filter contents in current directory
• Show/hide hidden files
• Sort entries by modification time (newest to oldest)
• Spawn a SHELL in current directory (fallback sh)
• Run top
• Edit a file with EDITOR (fallback vi)
• Page through a file in PAGER (fallback less)

nnn toppings

Behaviour and navigation

• Detail view (default) with:
  • file type (directory, regular, symlink etc.)
  • modification time
  • human-readable file size
  • current item in reverse video
  • number of items in current directory
  • full name of currently selected file in status bar
  • show current entry number in status bar
• Search-as-you-type
• Navigate-as-you-type
• Bookmarks
• Run any number of custom scripts
• Custom color for directories
• Watch directory changes
• Create, rename files and directories
• Batch rename/move/delete current dir entries in vidir
• Show details of the currently selected file (similar to stat, file output)
• Show media information, list and extract archives
• Disk usage analyzer mode (within the same fs, doesn't follow symlinks)
• Volume capacity and volume free in help
• Directories first (even with sorting)
• Pin and jump to a directory
• Sort numeric names in numeric order
• Case-insensitive alphabetic content listing instead of upper case first
• Key - to jump to last visited dir, & to jump to initial dir, ~ takes HOME
• Roll over at the first and last entries of a directory (with Up/Down keys)
• Remove navigation restriction with relative paths (and let permissions handle it)
• Sort entries by file size (largest to smallest)
• Invoke ^K absolute file path copier (set using environment variable NNN_COPIER)
• Change to last visited directory on quit
• Add ^Q as shortcut to quit (to exit even from filter mode)
• Support vlock as terminal screensaver
• Remove code to run top
• UTF-8 support

File association

• open with custom application
• nlay - customizable script to handle actions (retired)
• Support NNN_USE_EDITOR to open text files in EDITOR (fallback vi)
• Support NNN_DE_FILE_MANAGER

Optimization

• All redundant buffer removal
• All frequently used local chunks now static
• Do not deallocate, re-use memory till program exit
• Remove some redundant string allocation and manipulation
• Simplify some roundabout procedures
• Compiler warnings fixed
• strip the final binary
• more on performance...