In past years, as a developer, for some features or the early stages of software, writing down the code felt like a chore. You knew what to do and you had to tediously spell it out. Of course, with AI tools like Claude Code (which I like in particular, the CLI approach appeals to me) this now is vastly better, and actually it’s quite easy to accidentally take it too far.
But here, I want to talk about something different: It happens that you search for a tool and then you come across something that almost does what you want, but not quite.
Before AI programming tools, you either had to be lucky to know the software stack, or it must be a really important problem to you that you would try to understand the codebase and make the modification you need.
Today, I can just use Claude Code to modify any tool how I like. So instead of turning away in frustration, I just ask Claude to help me fix what doesn’t work for me. How great is that?
A recent example for me has been transferring files to my Android Phone. OpenMTP exists but to me it has proven to be highly unrealiable, you need to remember to not have Preview open in macOS for it to work, and recently it didn’t complete a copy process but didn’t tell me about it. I only found out on the go that some files had not been copied.
So I realized, that I can use adb to push files to my phone using the debug mode. It’s very niche, I know, but it works. And then I realized a little UI would be nice, and I discovered darkhz’s adbtuifm. A tool written in Go but only tested on Linux, a file manager like Total Commander for the CLI that uses adb in the background.
And indeed, it didn’t really work well on macOS CLI. The left side appeared empty.
But this is what it looks like today:
So I forked it and adapted it to my needs:
- It now uses the current directory instead of the non-existent-on-macOS
/home. - Fixed the colors so that things are also readable in light mode.
- Introduced an ADB log pane to see what’s going on behind the scenes.
- It now shows size and last modification dates.
- Introduced history navigation.
- Even fixed a (tricky?) UI hang when deleting files.
The most important change for me probably was the first one, and, ok, I could have probably just changed the hardcoded string myself.
But it was such a joy to continue and make the tool nicer to use! Also, I don’t think I could have fixed that hanging UI before wasting too much time.
You can try my version, and maybe fork it and add more things you like yourself? I could send back a PR but maybe I won’t do it this time because my changes are opinionated and the repo seems abandoned with the last change in 2022.
Likes
Reposts