Launch broot as br in win 10

[Trid-collab]

How do I launch broot as br in Windows 10

[Stargateur]

It's a incomplete question, what difficulty do you have ?

This is documentation available here

[Trid-collab]

This is the message I am getting when I try to run "br" It works when I type broot

[Canop]

The br is a shell function which needs installation. When you have a shell like bash or zsh installed, broot can install the br function. This should work on WSL but I have no competence on this OS.

Without such shell, I don't know how to define a br function. I think that some Windows users did make a br shell function but I can't help you here.

Windows users would be welcome to chime in.

[Stargateur]

my workflow on powershell is:

cargo install broot
broot

work perfectly.

[Trid-collab]

On different note installing broot using cargo on my wsl2 setup +Ubunut 20.04 on win10 fails

[Canop]

@Trid-collab "fails" isn't really precise enough for me to try fix it. What happened ?

[adriansosa]

I'll install Ubuntu 20.04 on wsl2 and report back if I have any issues.

[thorstenkampe]

I just ran into this, too: when you run broot for the first time, it will ask to install a shell wrapper to launch broot as br. broot will install wrappers for bash, zsh, and fish (which are completely useless on Windows) but will not install a wrapper for PowerShell or Cmd. Despite of that it will claim success.

The fix is obvious: don't try to install the br wrappers on Windows (where they are useless) but notify the user that cd support is not implemented on Windows yet.

[thorstenkampe]

Documenting the limited Windows support in the documentation would probably also lead to less frustration for Windows users.

[whatisaphone]

br is very close to working on windows in git bash. If you run br and press alt+enter, broot writes this to the outcmd file:

cd C:\Users\John

The slashes are not quoted/escaped, so running that command results in this error:

sh: cd: C:UsersJohn: No error

If the path was escaped, it would work perfectly.

[AeliusSaionji]

Here, I mocked this up. Windows users please test and let me know if there are issues.

Add it to your powershell profile (in powershell, echo $PROFILE to see where the file should go if you don't have one yet, or notepad $PROFILE to jump right into it).

Note: on Windows Alt-Enter is swallowed by the terminal, used to make it fullscreen. You can unbind Alt-Enter with the new Windows Terminal, but not the built in ones. For those, you'll have to just use broot's :cd command directly.

Function br {
  $args = $args -join ' '
  $cmd_file = New-TemporaryFile

  $process = Start-Process -FilePath 'broot.exe' `
                           -ArgumentList "--outcmd $($cmd_file.FullName) $args" `
                           -NoNewWindow -Wait -PassThru -WorkingDirectory $PWD

  If ($process.ExitCode -eq 0) {
    $cmd = Get-Content $cmd_file
    Remove-Item $cmd_file
    If ($cmd -ne $null) {
      Invoke-Expression -Command $cmd
    }
  } Else {
    Remove-Item $cmd_file
    Write-Warning "broot exited with error code $process.ExitCode"
  }
}

[AeliusSaionji]

It occurs to me: I'm very new to broot and I don't know what commands other than cd broot may try to invoke.

Is there a list somewhere?

edit: from the verbs doc page, seems like the only builtin external command is cd.

User custom made external commands will work if they are written in powershell.

[ok-nick]

@AeliusSaionji I gave it a try and it works well with just one issue: when I call :cd it closes broot, then hangs the terminal for about 1-2 seconds before changing the directory.

[AeliusSaionji]

Try this:

Function br {
  $args = $args -join ' '
  $cmd_file = New-TemporaryFile

  $process = Start-Process -FilePath 'broot.exe' `
                           -ArgumentList "--outcmd $($cmd_file.FullName) $args" `
                           -NoNewWindow -PassThru -WorkingDirectory $PWD

  Wait-Process -InputObject $process #Faster than Start-Process -Wait
  If ($process.ExitCode -eq 0) {
    $cmd = Get-Content $cmd_file
    Remove-Item $cmd_file
    If ($cmd -ne $null) { Invoke-Expression -Command $cmd }
  } Else {
    Remove-Item $cmd_file
    Write-Host "`n" # Newline to tidy up broot unexpected termination
    Write-Error "broot.exe exited with error code $($process.ExitCode)"
  }
}

For completion's sake (:smirk:), here's how to set up tab completions, too. In $PROFILE,

# invoke broot as br
. path\to\br.ps1

# broot/br tab completions
. path\to\_br.ps1
. path\to\_broot.ps1

The br.ps1 is the code at the top of this post. The tab completion files are here: https://dystroy.org/broot/download/completion/_br.ps1 https://dystroy.org/broot/download/completion/_broot.ps1

[AeliusSaionji]

ah, someone else shared a slightly different solution months ago.

Their's won't support custom user commands, but it does have broot make use of pushd/popd instead of cd.

https://github.com/Canop/broot/issues/588#issue-1349551457

[saona-raimundo]

Shall we document this solution somewhere or are there open questions?

[Canop]

@saona-raimundo As I don't know Powershell and have no Windows machine to test, I'd need several users to decide what's the best script. From there I could for example add it on the broot site.

[iHeadway]

@saona-raimundo As I don't know Powershell and have no Windows machine to test, I'd need several users to decide what's the best script. From there I could for example add it on the broot site.

The function from #588 sometimes throws an error:

$dir = $cd.substring(3)
     |      ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
     | You cannot call a method on a null-valued expression.

So, it's better to use the function from @AeliusSaionji. And this definitely should be in the docs. And for the "alt-enter" it's better to change hotkey in verbs.hjson to ctrl-enter:

    {
        apply_to: directory
        key: "ctrl-enter"
        external: "cd {file}"
        from_shell: true
    }

[chtenb]

I've been using br on windows without issue in nushell.

[Dominiquini]

Maybe is duplicate from: "https://github.com/Canop/broot/issues/788"

I solve my problem here: https://github.com/Canop/broot/issues/788#issuecomment-2094525162

Thanks.