yazi

I’ve been using Midnight Commander for years and I still enjoy it pretty much. The first time I’ve seen a file manager using the multi-column layout was on NeXTSTEP operating system. It was pretty smart, I felt in love with this operating system. When I first used yazi it reminded me of the early days of this OS who hasn’t been around long enough for my taste. So let me introduce you to yazi, a terminal based multi-column file manager written in Rust.

cheatsheet

Let me start by the most important shortcuts for day to day use.

General

File Operations

Navigation & Selection

You can tweak all of the above hotkeys.

Installation

On macOS

brew install yazi fzf zoxide glow

On Arch Linux

sudo pacman -S yazi ffmpeg p7zip jq poppler fd ripgrep fzf zoxide imagemagick glow

You can also install the latest version from source

yay -S yazi-git

To quit it and stay in the current directory, add the following lines to your ~/.zshrc

#Yazi - allows to keep dir location when existing with q otherwise use Q
function y() {
        local tmp="$(mktemp -t "yazi-cwd.XXXXXX")" cwd
        yazi "$@" --cwd-file="$tmp"
        if cwd="$(command cat -- "$tmp")" && [ -n "$cwd" ] && [ "$cwd" != "$PWD" ]; then
                builtin cd -- "$cwd"
        fi
        rm -f -- "$tmp"
}

Now to integrate with fzf and zoxide you can also add

#fzf - Set up fzf key bindings and fuzzy completion
source <(fzf --zsh)

#zoxide - better cd
eval "$(zoxide init zsh)"

After source ~/.zshrc you can launch it.

y

Plugins

One of the beauty of yazi is his ability to be extended with plugins. In my case I’ve installed the following ones

# to add border
ya pack -a yazi-rs/plugins:full-border

# to show git status
ya pack -a yazi-rs/plugins:git

# allow to zoom into preview with T
ya pack -a yazi-rs/plugins:max-preview

# required to preview Markdown files
ya pack -a Reledia/glow

Once installed you have to tweak your configuration files

# enable borders and git plugins
vi  ~/.config/yazi/init.lua
require("full-border"):setup()
require("git"):setup()

# keymap configuration for max-preview
vi ~/.config/yazi/keymap.toml
[[manager.prepend_keymap]]
on   = "T"
run  = "plugin max-preview"
desc = "Maximize or restore preview"

# general configuration for git and md previewing
vi ~/.config/yazi/yazi.toml
[[plugin.prepend_fetchers]]
id   = "git"
name = "*"
run  = "git"

[plugin]
prepend_previewers = [
  { name = "*.md", run = "glow" },
]

You’re almost done. If you are running yazi on macOS you can configure it to launch the native quickview by adding in your keymap.toml

[[manager.prepend_keymap]]
on = "<C-p>"
run = '''
  shell 'qlmanage -p "$@"'
'''

Enjoy yazi.

What’s missing

When comparing with Midnight Commander the most important missing feature for me, is the ability to connect to remove machines to easily swap files. It seems it’s in the roadmap of yazi, so hopefully I may replace MC on most of my use cases. But I think I’ll still use it on my NAS, MC works better there because of less dependencies required.

Links

• yazi
• documentation