[Savannah-hackers] submission of Midnight Express - savannah.gnu.org

[bergstrj]

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James Bergstra <address@hidden> described the package as follows:
License: gpl
Other License: 
Package: Midnight Express
System name: mexpress
Type: GNU

Description:
This goal of this project is to produce a keyboard driven, keystroke-efficient 
file manager.  The app will be a curses app.

The principle of this browser is that it offers a list of options, and allows 
the user to pick one.  To this end, the main (tiny) software engine maintains 
it's current node in a graph, and at all times offers options corresponding to 
the out edges of that node.  

The app will be quick and efficient to use because it will aim to require the 
minimum number of keystrokes per option selection.

The app will be flexible, extensible, and useful because
 plugins will provide additional functionality to complement the graph 
traversal. The filesystem plugin will access the filesystem directory structure 
in this way.  Accessing a regular file will trigger a list of actions to 
perform on that file.  Actions like "open in vim", "open by mailcap", will 
launch independent file handlers, while actions like "bookmark", "delete", 
"select" will be handled internally.

In the future I would like to incorporate plugins to make better use of "find", 
and to provide process management via what will look to the user like virtual 
directories.  On a more exotic note, I'd like to offer an ysm (icq client) 
plugin, mail handling, ftp, ssh access, and whatever else seems like it might 
be a good idea.

Plugins will of course be supported through GUILE.  The rest of the program is 
written in ANSI C.

This project is not written yet, but it has been through a few rounds of 
hacking and architecting, and i'm pretty happy with the current approach.  It 
is currently a 500-line ncurses-based crippled version of 'ls', but the source 
can be found at

http://www-etud.iro.umontreal.ca/~bergstrj


Other Software Required:
NCurses

Other Comments:



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