2025-11-02 -- File management and workflows in terminals or GUIs
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My  desktop stopped having icons about 15 years ago. And I stopped using
GUI file managers around the same time. It's  all  terminal-based  since
then.

It's  well-known  by  now that I have a certain affinity for the Windows
Explorer of the 95 to 2000 era. Every time I start a Win2k VM,  I  can't
help  but  think "wow, this was nice". Or maybe I'm just growing tired a
bit of my current workflow and setup.

PCManFM is surprisingly similar to Windows Explorer  and  you  can  even
make  the  Qt version look somewhat similar. I've been playing with this
program for the last couple of weeks.

It took me a while to realize that it's not really  about  file  manage-
ment.  It's  about the entire workflow. Just using PCManFM every now and
then isn't meaningful. I've build so many small things  that  only  make
sense  in  a terminal. I'd have to change everything from terminal-based
to GUI-based again. I'd need to have a desktop  with  icons  again,  I'd
need  to have a start menu again. I'd need a Git GUI integration. And so
on, and so on.

Not only is that a lot of work, it's also less powerful.

I think a better way forward is to keep perfecting my terminal  worklow.
There are rough edges that could need some improvement.

As  a  first step, I polished up some scripts -- some of which I've been
using unchanged for over a decade! -- that help  with  file  management.
For  example,  I  have a "clipboard" system for the terminal, i.e. I can
mark some files for copy/cut and then do the  paste  operation  in  some
other  terminal.  And  I have "vmv", an interactive version of "mv" that
makes use of Vim. Stuff like that.

What really isn't  great,  though,  is  my  very  frequent  use  of  "cd
$project".  I'd  like to have something like OS/2's "work folders" -- or
whatever they're called in English, I don't  know,  sorry.  The  feature
goes  like this: You can mark a folder as a "work folder" and that makes
it a "container" for a "session" of programs. When you open that folder,
all the programs open with it. Close it and all the programs close. That
means you could make, say, "~/work/C/my-http-server" a work  folder  and
every  time  you open it, a Vim with the source code opened appears, the
documentation for some library opens (because you need to look up  stuff
often), a terminal opens where you can run tests, and so on.

Just  *opening*  these  things  would  be pretty easy, just make a shell
script.  *Closing* them all in one go, *remembering their settings*  and
so  on, that would be the hard part. I doubt that I'm going to implement
all that. But maybe parts of it. Somehow.