Ranger File Explorer - A VIM-inspired filemanager for the console

Aug 26, 2022 · 2 min read · file manager tui  ·
Share on:

Ranger is one of the most advanced and feature-rich file manager for the terminal, including multi-column display, preview of many types of files, common file operations as create/chmod/copy/delete (of course!), tabs, bookmarks, and mouse support.

Availability and install

Ranger is packaged for all the major distros. It can thus be installed with the distro's package manager. The program is written in Python, and it is also made available on PyPi, where the package is called ranger-fm. It can thus be installed for the current user with

1pip install --user ranger-fm

or system-wide with

1sudo pip install ranger-fm

Some interesting features

Ranger uses a vi-like keybindings for the navigation and the other main operations, so that the most important functions can be triggered with one or two keystrokes.

The program is highly configurable. Being written in Python, its configuration/customization typically requires the writing of some few Python code. As usual, the Arch wiki reports several useful information regarding some of the most common and interesting customizations.

Preview of files and directories

Ranger ships with a file opener called rifle, which is able to handle the most common file types, such as images, pdfs and office document. The preview of images and other files can be shown right in the terminal. Various external utilities are leveraged to convert those file types that are not text-based and to extract the content to show in the terminal.

Its multi-column layout always provides the preview of the selected directory. See the example showing the preview of a jpeg and html files (go to the original asciicast).

References