A Netwr emulator implementation for BASH

This post was moved from http://rawtext.club where it was originally posted.

Mon Nov 8 10:52:13 PM CET 2021

Hello. Netwr is an awesome addition to Vim functionality. I like firing up Vim with just vim . so a file selector can allow me to pick a file and open it in Vim. I thought it would be awesome to have something like Netwr but for just any BASH command, not just Vim. So I implemented it. In a way, and for a simple file picker, it is “better” than Netwr, since this implementation allows for the user to pick more than one file and use them as arguments to whatever command they’re typing at the BASH command line.

Unfortunatelly, it uses dialog and its annoying blue paraphernalia, but I’ll show here how to change that to black.

Edit your .bashrc file and add:

selectafile()
{
 FILE=$(dialog --stdout --title "Please choose a file" --fselect $PWD/ 14 48)
 READLINE_LINE=$READLINE_LINE$FILE
 READLINE_POINT=${#READLINE_LINE}
}

bind -x '"\e[24~":selectafile'

Source it with source .bashrc and then, each time you press the F12 key, a file selector will pop up, you select the file, hit OK, and you’re back typing the command you were just typing. The process can be repeated multiple times while typing one and the same line at the BASH command prompt.

Fighting dialog’s annoyance

This BASH function and key-binding uses dialog. Install it like so: $ sudo apt-get install dialog. I use Debian. Check dialog’s web site to see how to install it on your machine.

Create a .dialogrc file like so: $ dialog --create-rc ~/.dialogrc. Then edit the file and change the settings for use_colors and for screen_color, like so:

use_colors = ON
screen_color = (CYAN,BLACK,ON)

Ok, this is my exmas present for rawtext and its users, and also for all the users of tilde club, sdf and grex in 2019.

You can go back to my home page at rawtext, but you can also visit my other personal pages: my home page at polarhome on an AIX7 machine, my other page at polarhome (on an Ubuntu machine), my home page at sdf, my home page at grex or its alias, my web page at tilde club, and also my personal web site. Email me at gasconheart@tilde.club to provide some feedback.