personalunixhacks/rover/FAQ.md

Frequently Asked Questions

How to use Rover to change the current directory of a shell?

Rover cannot change the working directory of its calling shell directly. However, we can use the option --save-cwd to write the last visited path to a temporary file. Then we can cd to that path from the shell itself.

The following shell script can be used to automate this mechanism. Note that it needs to be sourced directly from the shell.

#! /bin/sh

# Based on ranger launcher.

# Usage:
#     . ./cdrover.sh [/path/to/rover]

tempfile="$(mktemp 2> /dev/null || printf "/tmp/rover-cwd.%s" $$)"
if [ $# -gt 0 ]; then
    rover="$1"
    shift
else
    rover="rover"
fi
"$rover" --save-cwd "$tempfile" "$@"
returnvalue=$?
test -f "$tempfile" &&
if [ "$(cat -- "$tempfile")" != "$(echo -n `pwd`)" ]; then
    cd "$(cat "$tempfile")"
fi
rm -f -- "$tempfile"
return $returnvalue

How to open files with appropriate applications?

Rover doesn't have any built-in functionality to associate file types with applications. This is delegated to an external tool, designated by the environmental variable $ROVER_OPEN. This tool must be a command that takes a filename as argument and runs the appropriate program, opening the given file.

As an example, the following shell script may be used as $ROVER_OPEN:

#! /bin/sh

# Usage:
#     ./open.sh /path/to/file

case "$1" in
  *.htm|*.html)
    fmt="elinks %s" ;;
  *.pdf|*.xps|*.cbz|*.epub)
    fmt="mutool draw -F txt %s | less" ;;
  *.ogg|*.flac|*.wav|*.mp3)
    fmt="play %s" ;;
  *.[1-9])
    fmt="man -l %s" ;;
  *.c|*.h|*.sh|*.lua|*.py|*.ml|*[Mm]akefile)
    fmt="vim %s" ;;
  *)
    fmt="less %s"
esac

exec sh -c "$(printf "$fmt" "\"$1\"")"