fen

fen is a terminal file manager inspired by ranger\ Works for Linux, macOS, FreeBSD and Windows

Installing

Prebuilt binaries

Download and run the latest version in the Releases page

Add it to your path environment variable, or (on Linux/FreeBSD) place the executable in /usr/local/bin

Building from source

This requires Go 1.21.5 or above (install Go)

git clone https://github.com/kivattt/fen
cd fen
go build
./fen # fen.exe on Windows

Controls

Arrow keys, hjkl, mouse click or scrollwheel to navigate (Enter goes right), Escape key to cancel an action

? or F1 Toggle help menu\ F2 Show libraries used in fen\ q Quit fen\ z or Backspace Toggle hidden files\ Ctrl + Space or Ctrl + n Open file(s) with specific program\ ! Run system shell command (cmd on Windows)\ Home or g Go to the top\ End or G Go to the bottom\ Ctrl + Left arrow Go to the root folder (or current Git repository if fen.git_status=true)\ Ctrl + Right arrow Go to the path furthest down in history, follow a symlink or go to the first changed file if fen.git_status=true\ M Go to the middle\ Page Up / Page Down Scroll up/down an entire page\ H Go to the top of the screen\ L Go to the bottom of the screen\ Del or x Delete file(s)\ y Copy file(s)\ d Cut file(s)\ p Paste file(s)\ / or Ctrl + f Search\ c Goto path\ Space Select files\ A Flip selection in folder (select all files)\ D Deselect all, press again to un-yank\ a Rename a file\ b Bulk-rename (rename in editor)\ V Start selecting by moving\ n Create a new file\ N Create a new folder\ F5 Refreshes files, syncs the screen (fixes broken output), refreshes git status when fen.git_status=true\ 0-9 Go to a configured bookmark

Configuration

You can find a complete default config with extra examples in the config.lua file\ For a full config folder example, see my personal config

Linux/FreeBSD: ~/.config/fen/config.lua or $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/fen/config.lua if $XDG_CONFIG_HOME set\ macOS: $HOME/Library/Application Support/fen/config.lua\ Windows: %AppData%\Roaming\fen\config.lua

You can specify a different config file with the --config flag

Left-clicking to copy the selected path on Linux/FreeBSD requires xclip to be installed

File previews

fen does not (yet!) have file previews by default\ For file previews with programs like cat or head, you can add something like this to your config.lua:

fen.preview = {
    {
        program = {"head -n 100"},
        match = {"*"}
    }
}

For something cross-platform, file previews can also be a lua script.

fen.preview = {
    {
        script = fen.config_path.."basic.lua",
        match = {"*"}
    }
}

If "script" is set, "program" will be ignored in the same preview entry.\ "script" can not be a list like "program" can, because we want to see syntax errors when writing lua code instead of falling back to anything.\ The "script" key has to be an absolute file path

Changing directory

You can change the current working directory to the one in fen on exit:

cd $(fen --print-folder-on-exit)

You can alias fen to do this every time you open it by adding this to your .bashrc:

cd_fen() {
    cd $(fen --print-folder-on-exit)
}
alias fen=cd_fen

NOTE: Using this alias will break command-line arguments, like fen -v since the output will be passed to cd.

Known issues

• fen may crash in the middle of deleting files due to a data race, most commonly when deleting a lot of files (like 4000)
• File previews are ran synchronously, which means they slow down fen
• fen intentionally does not handle Unicode "grapheme clusters" (like chinese text) in filenames correctly for performance reasons. You need to manually build fen with the replace directive for my tcell fork in the go.mod file removed to show them correctly
• Symlinks have no special distinction, a folder symlink will appear like a normal folder
• On FreeBSD, when the disk is full, fen may erroneously show a very large amount of disk space available (like 18.446 EB free), when in reality there is no available space
• go test doesn't work on Windows
• The color for audio files is invisible in the default Windows Powershell colors, but not cmd or Windows Terminal
• Bulk-renaming a .git folder on Windows hangs fen forever

See TODO.md for other issues and possible future features, roughly sorted by priority