I built my own Neovim file explorer

Why not just using an existing plugin?

I don't like file explorers, that's one of the reasons why I use Neovim. Tree-like file explorers especially, they stand too much in the way of my workflow and I don't like to have a lot of things on the side of my editor. I just want to have a clean and minimal interface where I can focus on my code.

However, lately I've been getting lost in some big projects and I found myself spawning lots of terminals in order to print "ls" in different directories just to find the file I wanted to edit. When ls wasn't enough, I also tried to leverage eza and lf, but I still found myself doing a lot of cd and e commands in order to navigate through the file system. I thought to myself, why not using Netrw, the builtin Neovim file explorer?

Again, not a plugin like Neotree or Nvim-tree or whatever, because I don't like tree-like file explorers, too much noise for my taste. Netrw is a flat file explorer, it just shows you the files in the current directory and you can navigate through them with some keybindings. It seemed like a good fit for my needs, so I gave it a try.

Things were going okaysh for a while, but then ...

The problem with Netrw

The thing is just a nightmare to use. Keybindings doesn't really feel well integrated with the rest of Neovim. Wanna get a taste of it? Just type nvim . in your terminal and see it for yourself.

But then I experimented with the Lex command, which is a command that opens Netrw in a vertical split and it was slightly better. I've also customized it a little bit by adding the following options:

vim.g.netrw_banner = 0
vim.g.netrw_keepdir = 0
vim.g.netrw_winsize = 15

Not too bad, but there were a couple of things that were drawing me crazy. First of all, it doesn't follow you. Like, when I open a file with fzf or whatever file picker, I want the file explorer to automatically refresh and show me the directory of the file I just opened. Netrw doesn't do that. But I said ok, it's a thing I can try to solve with an autocmd. And that's what I did. Cool!

But then I noticed that whenever I opened a file with fzf, or did something else I can't quite remember now, Netrw would randomly create new empty buffers. I tend to work a lot with the fzf buffer list, and it was super annoying to have a new empty buffer appear every time I opened a file. Again, I thought to myself, why not just solve this with another autocmd? And that's what I did.

But then I thought, it would be nice to create a toggle command for the file explorer and triggering it with a custom keybinding. You know what? It would also be nice to get an idea of which file is currently staged in git and which one is not without opening lazygit (this one is wip for now). Or to perform some little file operations without having to always open mini-files.

You know, that kind of stuff.

I was having my hands dirty again when I thought: "Why not just build my own file explorer? It can't be that hard, right? I'm already doing all of this stuff with this half-baked file explorer called Netrw."

The joy of programming in Lua

I want to be honest with you, the development experience was brutal initially, I had to deal with a lot of edge cases and I had to learn a lot about how Neovim works under the hood. But it was a fun experiment and I'm pretty happy with the result. It's not perfect, but it does the job for me and it doesn't get in the way of my workflow, it's a win!

The thing it's also super-fast! I also went further and added some basic file operations like opening a file, creating a new file, deleting a file, etc.

I called it Lsplorer because it mimics the output of ls and I'm thinking about open-sourcing it as a plugin, but I don't know if it's worth it since it's pretty basic and there are already a lot of file explorers out there. Maybe I'll just keep it as a personal project and share it with my friends for now.

I have to say that programming in Lua is a lot of fun, it's a really nice language to work with and it's super easy to learn. I was able to create something functional in a relatively short amount of time. I also learned a lot about how Neovim works under the hood and how to leverage its API to create custom functionality. It was a great learning experience and I'm pretty happy with the result.

Next features

Like I said, Lsplorer can add, rename, delete and open files. It can't cut/paste and move files yet, and that's the next feature I want to add. Another thing it is missing it's a way to perform bulk operations, like selecting multiple files and performing an operation on them. That would be a nice addition but it's already something that I can live without for now since for cases like that I can just rely on mini-files. The way I would like to achieve it's an hybrid approach between Neotree and mini-files. We'll see how it goes!

Check it out

You can check it here, on my Neovim config repository. Again, it's not a plugin, it's just a simple Lua module that you can require in your Neovim config and use it as you like. If you want to use it, just copy the lsplorer folder in your Neovim config and require it in your init.lua file. You will also need to define a keybind in order to toggle it (I'm using leader + E).

If you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement, feel free to reach out to me via email or LinkedIn, I would love to hear your thoughts and ideas on how to make it better!