clist: What happens to a dream deferred?

The notes packed into the tarball for clist suggest the 0.1.0 version was a skeletal release, intended to show some work and to see if there was community support for the project.

And now, more than eight years later, the home page is a scrambled default wiki index, clist itself has only a smattering of its advertised options, and the Sourceforge mailing lists apparently haven’t ever heard of clist. 😥

So another project sputters and fades. It’s worth mentioning that the clist corpus is still functional for the most part.

And as a single-pane file manager, it might remind you of things like ranger or maybe nffm. With less color, less features and an obvious list of things that need improved. 🙄

If clist’s goal was to show as many files as possible in a single pane, it does a good job. clist can cram about 80 files, maybe more, into an 80×24 space, provided their names aren’t terrifically long.

And it has a few added bonuses, like a status bar and a speedy reverse-highlight selector. Navigation is via arrow keys, with the management options near the bottom of the display. And it’s written in C, and as we know, that can be very helpful at the low end of the speed scale.

But that’s where clist ran out of steam. The help key doesn’t work. Other options seem functional, but are a bit clumsy to use. For example, moving or copying a file between directories requires you to type out the destination in full, without any tab completion. Yikes.

There aren’t many navigation hotkeys, although the TODO list says at one time the plan was to set the tilde to send you straight back to your $HOME. Some of the other projected features were interesting too; take a look, just for fun.

But clist seems to have gone into hibernation at that point. Perhaps the community support the author wanted never materialized, or maybe interest just fell off.

I still hold out hope though. After all, if slsc can return from the dead, nearly a decade after its last working release, then there’s hope for all of us. 😉