Navigator project

Navigator (or nav) is a faithful recreation of the iconic DOS Navigator two-panel file manager for modern POSIX terminals.

It contains of three parts:

• navkit - the application core library.
  • defines Application class that holds async event-loop and orchestrates widget render on ANSI terminal
  • handles ANSI terminal - cell render, terminal events, keyboard and mouse events
  • defines a screen buffer where all the widgets render their contents and which is rendered to terminal on demand
  • defines Widget abstract class that has its own render() method that renders to screen buffer
  • defines observable attributes on widgets that when changed trigger update of other widget attributes that reference them
  • defines css-like style sheet library and style lookup engine (*.nss files)
• navml - custom markup language and widget library
  • defines a custom markup language in *.nml files heavily inspired by QML and Kivy frameworks – QML for the architecture, Kivy for the syntax, so blocks are made by indentation, and lines carry no semicolons
  • defines an *.nml file parser that translates it into a node graph suitable for python class code-generator
  • defines a python class code-generator that traverses node graph from parser
  • silently merges a code-generated python class with a handwritten python module with event handlers
  • overrides python import routine so a single import handles the merged class
  • defines a rich widget library to handle windows, buttons, menus, labels, etc., defines standard event handlers. Heavily inspired by Borland's TurboVision library
• navigator or nav - two panel file manager application
  • defines a Manager window that has two panels with file listings
  • defines View and Edit file windows
  • performs file operations over the selected files in the manager
  • uses file system handlers that enable file operations over ssh, smb, in zip files, etc.
  • defines a flexible plugin system to expand core functionality with third party plugins
  • carefully recreates the look and feel of classic DOS Navigator by Ritlabs
  • TETRIS