Navigator project

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

Installing

Navigator is published on PyPI as navigator-fm (the names navigator and nav were taken long ago; navfm is an alias that installs the same thing). It needs Python 3.12 or newer, and pulls in one dependency, pyte.

pipx install navigator-fm
nav

pipx is the right tool because it gives the application its own environment and still puts nav on your PATH. pip install --user is refused on Debian and Ubuntu, whose Python is marked externally managed (PEP 668); inside a virtualenv, plain pip install navigator-fm is fine.

Neither pip nor pipx updates anything on its own — nav stays on the version you installed until you run pipx upgrade navigator-fm.

nav --version reports the version and the directory it is running from. That second half matters: if you have Navigator installed more than one way, ~/.local/bin comes before /usr/bin on most PATHs, and the copy that runs may not be the one you just installed.

$ nav --version
nav 0.0.2 from /home/you/.local/share/pipx/venvs/navigator-fm/lib/python3.12/site-packages/navigator (python 3.12.3)

Debian, Ubuntu

Packages are published from a signed repository, so apt upgrade carries new releases along with everything else. Needs Ubuntu 24.04 or Debian 13 and later.

sudo install -m 0755 -d /usr/share/keyrings
sudo curl -fsSL -o /usr/share/keyrings/navigator-fm-archive-keyring.gpg \
    https://yogsagot.github.io/navigator/navigator-fm-archive-keyring.gpg

sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/navigator-fm.sources > /dev/null <<'EOF'
Types: deb
URIs: https://yogsagot.github.io/navigator/deb
Suites: stable
Components: main
Architectures: all amd64 arm64
Signed-By: /usr/share/keyrings/navigator-fm-archive-keyring.gpg
EOF

sudo apt update && sudo apt install navigator-fm

Fedora, RHEL, Alma, Rocky

Needs Fedora 39 or RHEL 10 and later.

sudo rpm --import https://yogsagot.github.io/navigator/navigator-fm-archive-keyring.asc

sudo tee /etc/yum.repos.d/navigator-fm.repo > /dev/null <<'EOF'
[navigator-fm]
name=Navigator file manager
baseurl=https://yogsagot.github.io/navigator/rpm
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
repo_gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=https://yogsagot.github.io/navigator/navigator-fm-archive-keyring.asc
EOF

sudo dnf install navigator-fm

Run nav --help for the options; --theme NAME picks one of the eleven colour schemes, and --list-themes names them.

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