Support for netrw / vim-vinegar style file browsing

[WesleyAC]

Discussions about file browsing in Helix have focused on tree-style side panels. (See here for current status of that). However, I much prefer netrw / vim-vinegar style browsing, which is significantly simpler:

• From a file, press - to view a list of files that are in the same directory as the file you were editing. You can just j/k to move up and down, and press enter to open a file
• From a directory, press - again to move to the parent directory.

This allows for a few very nice things:

• Seeing what other files are in the current directory (simply press -, then press enter when you want to return to the file you were editing)
• Navigating to another file in the same directory or a nearby directory with very few keystrokes

I understand that some people prefer fuzzy-finding, and that can be better for some cases. However, I find this kind of quick UI very useful.

Helix already has something that seems at first glance to be similar to this — file_picker_in_current_buffer_directory — but that doesn't allow for navigating further up, nor using j/k to navigate the files.

Is this something that it would be reasonable to have in the core of Helix, or is this a "wait until there's a plugin system" situation?

[WesleyAC]

This post has much more detailed motivation for this paradigm, which may be interesting to people here.

[kirawi]

Ref https://matrix.to/#/!zMuVRxoqjyxyjSEBXc:matrix.org/$AbW0awK9XrJIHw6IqvcpXMxkhWt7apcgo-_8ndq5Qhs?via=matrix.org&via=mozilla.org&via=envs.net

[markstos]

Could you summarize what was interesting from that Matrix conversation here?