30 open-source projects similar to ranger/ranger, ranked by shared indexed features. Tags may describe platforms or build tools rather than the same primary purpose. Check each project’s use case, license, and deployment requirements before treating it as a replacement.
This project is a keyboard-driven terminal file manager designed for efficient navigation and manipulation of local and remote filesystems. It functions as both a standalone console file explorer and a versatile file picker, allowing users to select paths and pass them to external shell commands or system utilities for automated workflows. The application distinguishes itself through a highly modular architecture that supports compile-time feature flagging and static binary compilation, ensuring a minimal memory footprint and portability across environments. Users can extend its core function
lf is a terminal-based file manager and TUI file explorer that provides keyboard-driven navigation for browsing and organizing files and directories. It operates as a shell-integrated tool that synchronizes the current working directory with the calling shell and supports vi-style keybindings for filesystem operations. The project distinguishes itself through its ability to render images directly in the terminal via the SIXEL graphics protocol and its shell-driven execution model, which allows users to extend functionality using external shell scripts and commands. It also implements a server
fff is a terminal-based file manager written in Bash. It provides a text-user interface for navigating and manipulating directories and files using keyboard shortcuts. The project focuses on shell integration, maintaining directory context and allowing users to launch integrated terminal instances centered on the active folder. It includes a file picker mode for selecting items to be passed to external editors and supports integrated image rendering within the terminal. Core capabilities include keyboard-driven filesystem navigation, real-time directory filtering, and bookmarking. The tool s
Yazi is a high-performance terminal file manager designed for keyboard-driven navigation and organization of local file systems. Built as an asynchronous application, it utilizes a non-blocking runtime to execute concurrent file operations and interface updates, ensuring the user experience remains responsive even during intensive tasks. The interface is rendered directly into the terminal emulator using escape sequences to maintain minimal memory overhead. The application distinguishes itself through a modular architecture that supports custom functionality via an embedded scripting engine.
Joshuto is a keyboard-driven terminal user interface file manager built with Rust. It functions as a Vim-like file explorer, providing a text-based environment for browsing directories and performing filesystem operations through modal navigation and cursor-based movements. The project distinguishes itself through a side-by-side column view that allows for terminal file previewing, including the rendering of image thumbnails and file contents. It supports a highly customizable workflow where users can define their own keybindings, visual themes, and terminal styles through external configurat
Broot is an interactive terminal file manager designed for navigating, searching, and manipulating complex file system hierarchies. It provides a visual tree-based interface that allows users to explore disk contents, manage file operations, and execute shell commands directly within the command line environment. The tool distinguishes itself through real-time fuzzy searching and recursive tree traversal, which filter directory structures as you type to maintain a clear, relevant view of the file system. It integrates version control status directly into the navigation view, displaying branch
This project is a shell plugin that provides real-time command suggestions to accelerate terminal input. By hooking into the command line editor and utilizing a strategy-based prediction engine, it generates completions derived from command history, shell completion data, or custom user-defined sources. The tool distinguishes itself by rendering suggestions as a visual ghost layer directly within the terminal buffer using ANSI-styled overlays. To maintain a responsive command-line environment, it performs all prediction calculations in the background, ensuring that heavy computation does not
This project is a general-purpose command-line filter that provides an interactive interface for processing standard input streams. It enables real-time fuzzy searching, data selection, and transformation, allowing users to navigate complex information or file systems directly within their terminal. By utilizing a pipe-oriented architecture, it integrates into existing shell pipelines and workflows to facilitate efficient data exploration. What distinguishes this tool is its highly extensible, event-driven design that allows for deep integration with external processes. It supports asynchrono
xplr is a terminal-based file explorer that combines a composable panel layout engine with a Lua plugin runtime, allowing users to script custom keybindings, layouts, and workflow automation without recompiling. Its mode-based keybinding contexts switch mappings based on the current task, and the pipeline-based file filtering mechanism lets you dynamically refine the file listing with a visible, reorderable stack of criteria. The core integrates with external processes through a FIFO message bus, enabling commands and directory changes to flow between the explorer and outside tools. What sets
This tool is a rule-based engine designed to automate the correction of failed terminal commands. By integrating directly into the shell environment, it intercepts command execution errors, analyzes exit codes and output streams, and applies corrective logic to resolve typos or syntax mistakes. It functions as a persistent background utility that monitors command history to provide immediate remediation for input failures. The system distinguishes itself through a modular, plugin-oriented architecture that allows for extensive customization. Users can define their own correction rules via scr
VisiData is a terminal-based interactive data analysis tool and browser designed for exploring, filtering, and sorting large tabular datasets. It functions as a structured data inspector that loads and flattens complex formats like JSON, XML, and PCAP into interactive sheets, as well as a terminal file manager for navigating directories and performing staged filesystem operations. The project distinguishes itself by rendering data visualizations, such as scatter plots and histograms, directly in the terminal using Unicode Braille characters. It provides a Python-based data wrangling environme
z is a shell navigation utility and directory history tracker designed to reduce the amount of typing required to move through deep directory structures. It functions as a command line tool for jumping to frequently and recently visited directories using a ranking algorithm. The tool utilizes a frecency-based path jump system that weights the number of visits against the time elapsed since the last access to determine priority. It identifies candidate navigation targets by applying regular expression patterns against a database of visited paths. The utility integrates with the shell completi
💾 The shell-like, command line terminal file manager
Vifm is a file manager with curses interface, which provides Vim-like environment for managing objects within file systems, extended with some useful ideas from mutt.
Autojump is a shell directory navigation tool and weighted directory search utility. It functions as a path shortcut manager that allows users to jump to frequently visited directories using partial name matching. The tool optimizes shell workflows by learning navigation patterns and maintaining a weighted database of visited paths. It ranks folders based on access frequency and recency to resolve ambiguous queries and minimize the keystrokes required to reach deeply nested directories. Beyond shell navigation, the utility provides integration with native system file explorers to launch mana
This project is a terminal-based HTTP client designed for interacting with web services, debugging APIs, and automating network requests. It provides a specialized command-line interface that simplifies the construction of complex HTTP exchanges, allowing users to test and inspect web services directly from the shell. The tool distinguishes itself through a declarative syntax engine that translates shorthand command-line tokens into fully formed HTTP requests, including headers, parameters, and body payloads. It features a modular, plugin-based architecture that enables users to extend core f
mini.nvim is a comprehensive library of independent modules designed to extend Neovim with a wide array of navigation, user interface, and text manipulation tools. It serves as a modular plugin collection, a UI toolkit for creating custom statuslines and notifications, and a package manager for installing and pinning external plugins from Git. The project provides a specialized fuzzy picker framework for filtering files and symbols, an LSP completion engine with interactive snippet expansion, and a dedicated plugin test framework that uses headless editor instances and remote procedure calls
Eza is a command-line utility designed to replace standard directory listing tools by providing a more informative and visually intuitive interface for exploring file systems. Built with memory-safe systems programming, it queries low-level operating system interfaces to retrieve and display comprehensive file metadata, including permissions, ownership, and modification times. The tool distinguishes itself through its use of terminal-based color coding and advanced organization capabilities. It maps structured file metadata to specific color sequences to improve readability and offers modular
TagSpaces is an offline-first file tagging and organization platform that lets you manage local files with portable metadata stored directly in filenames or sidecar JSON files, eliminating the need for a central database. It functions as a full-text file search engine, a Kanban board file organizer, a local AI file assistant, an S3-compatible cloud file manager, and a web clipper and bookmark manager, all within a single application. The project distinguishes itself through a local-first architecture where all file operations, indexing, and AI processing run entirely on the device, with cloud
Exa is a command-line utility designed to replace traditional file listing commands in Unix-like environments. It functions as a terminal-based file explorer that displays directory contents alongside system metadata and file attributes. The tool distinguishes itself by integrating version control information directly into the directory listing, allowing users to view the status of files within a repository alongside standard system data. It utilizes terminal-based styling to provide color-coded output, which helps visually differentiate between file types and metadata. The utility supports
This project is a modular, terminal-based dashboard framework designed to aggregate and display real-time information within a grid-aligned interface. It functions as a centralized monitoring tool that translates data from local system resources, infrastructure services, and external web APIs into a unified, text-based display. The dashboard is distinguished by its plugin-based architecture, which allows users to encapsulate distinct data sources and display logic into isolated, independently managed modules. Users define their workspace through declarative configuration files or an interacti
This project is a community-driven repository of simplified, example-based reference guides for command-line tools. It functions as an open-source knowledge base designed to provide concise, practical usage examples that help developers navigate complex software without the need for lengthy technical documentation. The system relies on a decentralized architecture where independent client applications fetch and render documentation locally. This approach ensures that reference materials remain accessible offline while supporting a wide variety of user interfaces across desktop, mobile, and we
This project serves as a comprehensive repository and management framework for Zsh shell extensions, themes, and configuration bundles. It functions as a centralized resource for discovering and integrating community-driven enhancements designed to tailor the terminal experience and streamline command-line workflows. The framework distinguishes itself by providing automated tools for the installation, updating, and lazy-loading of modular shell plugins. By enforcing standardized directory structures and utilizing version control for dependency management, it ensures that shell configurations
screenFetch is a shell-based system information tool and terminal profiler. It retrieves hardware and software specifications, operating system details, and kernel data to display them within a terminal window. The utility combines system discovery with distribution branding, printing gathered specifications alongside ASCII-art logos. It includes a utility to trigger screenshots of the resulting terminal output. The tool handles environment variable extraction and the execution of external system commands to format and arrange system metadata for display.
This project is a high-performance command-line utility designed for rapid filesystem navigation and file discovery. It enables users to locate files and directories within large project structures using recursive search, pattern matching, and metadata-aware filtering. By employing multi-threaded parallel traversal, it provides an efficient way to explore complex directory trees. What distinguishes this tool is its ability to integrate directly into terminal workflows and automate file management tasks. It automatically respects version control ignore files and hidden file settings, ensuring
The easy way to switch between your projects on ZSH
This project is a command-line utility designed to list directory contents within terminal environments. It functions as a replacement for standard directory listing commands, providing enhanced visual metadata for files and folders on Unix-like systems. The tool distinguishes itself by integrating color-coded output and file-type icons directly into the terminal interface to improve readability. It utilizes a lookup system to assign these visual identifiers based on file names and extensions, while employing ANSI escape sequences to render the information. The utility supports recursive dir
Superfile is a keyboard-driven file manager designed for terminal environments. It provides a workspace for browsing, organizing, and manipulating local file systems through a multi-pane interface that supports standard file operations, directory navigation, and real-time fuzzy search. The application distinguishes itself through a modular architecture that allows for extensive customization of the user interface, including themes, icon sets, and layout dimensions. Users can define custom keyboard shortcuts, map file extensions to specific applications, and integrate external tools or scripts
This project is a Lua-based file explorer plugin for Neovim that provides a sidebar tree interface for navigating project directories. It functions as a file system node manipulator and a Git-integrated file manager, allowing users to interact with their project structure directly within the editor. The plugin distinguishes itself by integrating version control status into the visual tree, enabling users to track, stage, and unstage files through the explorer interface. It also features a public API that allows external scripts to trigger internal functions and subscribe to system events. Th