🗄️ Nuclr SQL Explorer

Browse a SQL database in Nuclr Commander as if it were a filesystem. Schemas are folders, tables and views are folders, rows are files — so the navigation, marking, quick view and copy keys you already use on files work on your data too.

Read-only by design. This plugin never issues an INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE or DDL statement. You can browse, filter, preview and export; you cannot change anything.

SQL Explorer
└── Shop (a saved connection)
    └── public (a schema)
        ├── users        (a table)
        │   ├── 1        (a row, named by its primary key)
        │   ├── 2
        │   └── 3
        └── active_users (a view, browsed the same way)

🔑 Rows are named by their primary key. A table without one falls back to the row's position in the listing (00000000, 00000001, …).

✨ Features

• 🔌 Connect to PostgreSQL, MySQL / MariaDB, SQL Server, or anything with a JDBC driver you point at.
• 📂 Navigate connection → schema → table/view → row with the ordinary cursor keys.
• 👁️ Quick view (Ctrl+Q) a row as a field list or raw JSON, or a table as a grid.
• 🔍 Filter and sort any table with a WHERE / ORDER BY fragment, shown in the location bar so a narrowed listing is never a mystery.
• 📤 Export to CSV — a whole table streamed to a file, or just the rows you marked.
• 📋 Copy as CSV to the clipboard, plus tab-separated copies for pasting straight into a spreadsheet.
• 🔐 Passwords in the OS credential store — Windows Credential Manager, macOS Keychain, or the Linux Secret Service. Never in a config file.
• 🎨 Theme-aware throughout: selections pick up the same accent the file panel marks entries with.

🚀 Getting started

1. Open the panel

Press Alt+F1 (left pane) or Alt+F2 (right pane) and choose SQL → SQL Explorer.

🐧 On Linux the window manager claims Alt+F1/Alt+F2 first, so Ctrl+Shift+1 and Ctrl+Shift+2 do the same thing.

2. Create a connection

Press F7, or right-click and choose New Connection….

Field	What it is
Name	Whatever you want to call it in the panel
Driver	PostgreSQL, MySQL / MariaDB, SQL Server, or Custom
Host / Port / Database	Feed the Build from fields button
JDBC URL	What actually gets used — build it, or paste your own
Username	Leave blank and you are never asked for a password
Password	Only ever used to connect; never written to the profile

Hit Test Connection to try it without saving anything, then OK.

💡 The first connection using a given driver downloads it from Maven Central and caches it under ~/.nuclr/plugins-data/dev.nuclr.plugin.core.panel.sql/drivers/. That one connect needs network; later ones do not.

3. Browse

Enter on the connection to open it, then walk down through schemas and tables to individual rows.

⌨️ Keys

Function bar

Key	Where	Does
F7	Explorer root, connections	New Connection…
F4	On a connection	Edit Connection…
F8	On a connection	Delete Connection (the profile, not the database)
F5	On a table, view or row	Copy to the other panel, as CSV
Ctrl+Q	On a table, view or row	Quick view

Sorting

Key	Sorts by
Ctrl+F3	Name — or the row key inside a table
Ctrl+F6	Size — in a schema listing
Ctrl+F7	Unsorted — back to the order the database returned
Ctrl+F12	Sort dialog

Marking rows

Marking is the commander's own, and works here exactly as it does on files:

Key	Does
Insert	Mark and move down
Space	Toggle the mark under the cursor
+	Mark a group by pattern
*	Invert every mark

Marked rows are what Export to CSV, Copy as CSV and F5 act on. With nothing marked, they act on whatever the cursor is standing on.

🖱️ Right-click menu

On a connection — New / Edit / Duplicate / Delete Connection, and Disconnect. The root listing's Status column tells you which connections are currently open.

On a table or view — Filter / Sort…, Count Rows, Export to CSV…, Copy as CSV.

On rows — Export to CSV… and Copy as CSV, acting on the marked rows.

👁️ Quick view (Ctrl+Q)

On a row — every column as a name: value list, with a JSON toggle for when you want to paste it somewhere.

On a table or view — the first 500 rows as a grid. Select rows with click, Ctrl-click and Shift-click, then right-click for:

Item	Gives you
Copy	Tab-separated, exactly what Ctrl+C gives
Copy with Headers	The same, with column names on the first line
Copy as CSV	Properly quoted CSV, identical to what an export writes
Select All	Every row in the preview

📏 Limits

Three caps keep the plugin honest about memory, and each one says when it is reached rather than quietly truncating:

Cap	Where	Why
50,000 rows	Table listing	A marker row appears at the end; add a filter to see past it
500 rows	Quick-view grid	It is a preview, not the browsing surface
10,000 rows	Whole-table Copy as CSV	The clipboard holds it all in memory at once — use Export to CSV for everything

Export to CSV has no cap. It streams straight to the file, so table size is bounded by your disk rather than by heap.

🔐 Credentials

Passwords go to the OS credential store through the host's NuclrCredentialStore, keyed by connection. They are never written to profiles.json, never logged, and never held longer than the connect needs.

If the OS store is unavailable — a locked keyring, no backend, denied access — the plugin degrades to asking for the password each time rather than failing. When "Remember password" cannot be honoured, it says so instead of silently dropping it.

Only a connection with a username is ever asked for a password. A URL carrying its own credentials, or a database that wants none, is left alone.

🔧 Drivers

Driver	Ships with the plugin?
PostgreSQL	⬇️ Downloaded on first use
MySQL / MariaDB	⬇️ Downloaded on first use
SQL Server	⬇️ Downloaded on first use
Custom	📁 You pick the jar

No JDBC driver is bundled, so the plugin stays small. Each driver is loaded in its own child classloader and connected through Driver.connect directly, so drivers cannot clash with one another or with the host.

Use SSL sends whichever property the selected driver actually understands — sslmode for PostgreSQL, sslMode/useSSL for MySQL, encrypt for SQL Server. A custom driver takes its encryption settings from the URL you wrote.

🏗️ Building

Needs Maven 3.9+ and JDK 25.

mvn clean verify     # compile, test, package and sign
mvn test             # tests only

The build produces target/filepanel-sql-<version>.zip plus a detached .zip.sig. Drop both into Commander's plugins/ directory and restart.

✍️ Signing reads a keystore path from the jarsigner.* properties in pom.xml. Use mvn clean package to build without signing.

🧪 Tests

The suite runs headless and needs no database server. It builds a real SQLite database on disk and navigates it through the ordinary custom-driver path, so listing, cancellation, CSV and lifecycle behaviour are exercised against real JDBC rather than a mock.

SQLite is a test-scoped dependency only — it is not offered as a driver and is not shipped in the bundle.

📦 What's in the bundle

Entry	Type	Id
SQL Explorer	FilePanel	dev.nuclr.plugin.core.panel.sql
SQL Row Viewer	QuickView	dev.nuclr.plugin.core.panel.sql.quickview

Built against dev.nuclr:platform-sdk:5.0.0.

📄 License

Apache License 2.0 — see LICENSE.