I don't think the level of reliability necessary for a file manager is achievable with vibe coding. This is an area where small bugs can cause immediate and catastrophic data loss.
If you're shopping for a file manager, I recommend avoiding any project that incorporates a significant amount of LLM-generated code. Maybe in theory it could be reviewed as thoroughly as handwritten code; in practice that never happens.
And I think human written tests at that. If the LLM is blind to the failure mode X, does it know to reliably write a test to evaluate the behavior of X?
I think it is interesting that these pieces of software are now being inspired by Midnight Commander and are being built by people who never worked with or experiences the original, Norton Commander.
Author here. Haha, thanks for all the feedback! I don't even want to pretend this is production-ready. When I vibe-coded this, the only user I had in mind was me. And I have to live with the consequence of unreliability.
I recently found that writing personal software through a coding agent is a fairly interesting endeavour. It's like I'm paying to get the software I need in the form of tokens.
Midnight Commander has always been my favorite terminal file manager. It's feature-rich, fast, and actually tries to be a file manager compared to modern alternatives. However, there are quite some features that I never used, and I couldn't configure a Vim bindings that works well for me.
With OpenCode, I can finally make my own terminal file manager. I borrowed the main design concepts from Midnight Commander and some behavior from NVim-Tree file explorer.
I hope you would like it, at least I do. Since this project is entirely vibe-coded, so I'm not going to accept PR from the community, but feel free to open issues and fork it.
37 comments
If you're shopping for a file manager, I recommend avoiding any project that incorporates a significant amount of LLM-generated code. Maybe in theory it could be reviewed as thoroughly as handwritten code; in practice that never happens.
I recently found that writing personal software through a coding agent is a fairly interesting endeavour. It's like I'm paying to get the software I need in the form of tokens.
> Inspired by Midnight Commander
Norton Commander.
Know and respect your elders.
> : opens a command prompt for power-user actions
Vibe coded or not, that's what puts me off from most nc/dn/mc reimplementations.
If you can't reach the command line by just typing the command, what's the point?
At least on this one you don't have to mouse click somewhere...
With OpenCode, I can finally make my own terminal file manager. I borrowed the main design concepts from Midnight Commander and some behavior from NVim-Tree file explorer.
I hope you would like it, at least I do. Since this project is entirely vibe-coded, so I'm not going to accept PR from the community, but feel free to open issues and fork it.