42.3k stars · MIT · v26.9.1, read from /releases/latest, shown as '01 Sep' with no year and therefore 1 September 2026 · Track this in Scout
A terminal file manager with previews of almost anything, that leaves you where you finished.
▶Repo detailsthe review · specs · pros & cons · install
What it is
A file manager written in Rust, built so that every slow operation — reading a folder, generating a preview, calculating a size — happens without freezing the interface. It has a plugin system, tabs, and a built-in fuzzy search.
What it is good for. Anyone who works in a terminal and keeps switching to a graphical window just to look at a picture or check which of four files is the right one. It is the fuller version of the idea behind tere, which Edition 27 covered: tere only changes folder, while this one does the whole job.
- Image, PDF and video previews inside the terminal, which is the part people do not expect to work.
- It is genuinely fast on folders with tens of thousands of files.
- Selecting many files and acting on them all is straightforward, which is where the arrow-key-and-Enter approach usually breaks down.
- Previews need extra programs installed —
ffmpegfor video,popplerfor PDF,7zipfor archives. Without them the previews are simply missing. - Leaving the shell in the chosen folder requires a small wrapper function in the shell configuration. Without it, quitting returns you to where you started and it looks broken.
- It is a terminal program with its own keys. Expect an hour of feeling slower before it makes you faster.
mgunyho/tereIt does one tenth as much on purpose: it only walks folders and leaves you in the one you chose, and there is nothing to learn.
Track this in Scout- jarun/nnn
It is the small, old and extremely fast option, about 150 KiB, with previews handled by plugins rather than built in.
Track this in Scout - yorukot/superfile
It offers the same modern terminal file management with a friendlier default layout, written in Go, and with fewer preview types.
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# macOS brew install yazi ffmpeg sevenzip poppler resvg imagemagick # or build it with Rust's package manager cargo install --locked yazi-fm yazi-cli
