nnn

nnn (pronounced "n cubed") is a file manager that runs inside a terminal window rather than as a graphical app. A file manager is the program you use to browse folders, open files, copy and rename things, and so on; nnn does this entirely with text and keyboard shortcuts. The README pitches it as tiny, nearly zero-config, and fast, with a small memory footprint (typically under 3.5MB) and a binary around 100KB.

You move around with the arrow keys, filter the current folder by typing, and press a single character key to do most actions. The README lists a wide set of built-in features: a disk-usage analyzer that shows where space is going, a batch renamer that lets you edit many filenames at once, the ability to pick files and pass them to other programs, multiple tabs (called contexts) with their own colors, bookmarks, sessions, jumping to remote folders that have been mounted with sshfs or rclone, instant search-as-you-type with fuzzy or regex options, sorting by name, time, size, or extension, a file picker mode for use with editors, FreeDesktop-compliant trash integration, creating and extracting archives, and changing directory in your shell when you quit nnn. Beyond the core program there is a separate plugin repository that adds things like live previews, image, video and audio thumbnails, mounting and unmounting disks, file diffs, and uploads. Independent plugins exist to embed nnn inside vim and neovim.

You would use nnn if you spend most of your time in a terminal and want a fast keyboard-driven way to navigate files without leaving it. It is written in C, runs on Linux, macOS, BSD, Haiku, Cygwin, WSL, the Raspberry Pi, and on Android via Termux.