colfm - a console, column-oriented file manager¶ ↑

colfm is a new, lightweight file manager written in Ruby with FFI::Ncurses. It is based on ideas of NeXTSTEP's File Viewer, the OS X Finder, Emacs dired, vifm, and Midnight Commander.

Screenshot¶ ↑

Installation¶ ↑

Only Ruby 1.8 is supported so far.

gem install ffi ffi-ncurses
cp colfm.rb ~/bin
cat colfm.zsh >>~/.zshrc        # or better source it

Usage¶ ↑

colfm displays the path to the current directory in columns. The right-most column is the currently active and is displayed in more detail (shows file sizes).

Command cheatsheet¶ ↑

j k  Up Down      move selection up/down
h    Left         go to parent column
l F3 Right Enter  enter directory/view file
J K  Next Prev    scroll up/down by half a screen
g    Home         move to first file
G    End          move to last file
/  C-s            enter I-search, find file by regular expression:
    /   Right         enter selected directory
    ..  Left          go to parent

.  ~              toggle display of dotfiles, backup files
s                 toggle sorting (name, extension, size, atime, ctime, mtime)
S                 reverse sorting
v                 toggle sidebar preview

n                 open directory in new tab
N                 close current tab
t TAB  T S-TAB    next/previous tab

m  SPC            mark/unmark selected file
%                 enter I-select, mark files by regular expression
c                 clear list of marked files
V                 list marked files
C  F5             copy marked files into current directory (cp -a)
M  F6             move marked files into current directory (mv)
+  F7             create new directory (mkdir -p)
X  F8             remove marked files recursively (rm -rf)

!                 run shell command:
    TAB               insert currently selected file
    S-TAB             insert currently marked files
C-l  C-r          refresh display
q  F10  C-o       quit colfm

All prompts can be canceled with ESC or C-g and support primitive editing with C-w and C-u in classical Unix manner.

ZSH integration¶ ↑

After loading colfm.zsh, you can:

• quickly toggle between shell and colfm by pressing C-o

• use “ccd” to change the directory with colfm

• use “cargs” as a shortcut for xargs on the marked files

• use “csel” to list the currently marked files, or pipe to csel to set them

AVFS support¶ ↑

If you want to browse various file archives or access remote file systems, colfm supports the AVFS fuse daemon:

avfsmount
colfm.rb ~/src/ruby-1.8.7-p249.tar.gz      # transparent
colfm.rb ~/.avfs/#ftp:ftp.ruby-lang.org/   # direct

Copyright¶ ↑

Copyright (C) 2010 Christian Neukirchen <purl.org/net/chneukirchen>

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

Links¶ ↑

Github page

<github.com/chneukirchen/colfm>

AVFS

<sourceforge.net/projects/avf/>

Christian Neukirchen

<chneukirchen.org/>