Dynamic File Manager (dfm) is a simple ncurses based file manager. It is inspired by ranger but tries to keep the user interface much simpler and memory footprint as well a CPU usage low.
- Uses inotify to always show an accurate view of the current directory
- Delegates file actions (open, copy, move, delete) to external scripts. The default scripts use see (run-mailcap), cp, mv and rm to perform the requested actions.
- Remembers the last selected file in every directory to quickly navigate to previously visited paths
- Filtered view: Show only files/directories matching a regular expression, i.e. certain file types. Can also be used to exclude dot-files.
- Shared clipboard: Multiple instances of dfm can share a clipboard if the environment variable DFM_CLIPBOARD_DIR is set to a writable directory. This way you can emulate tabs with screen mutliplexers or mutliple xterns running several dfm instances
- Browse archives with the help of FUSE. Archives are temporarily mounted, then a new instance of dfm launches in the mount point, and after this new instance is exited, the archive is unmounted
Building dfm requires wide-char enabled ncurses. To build just invoke
make
in the toplevel directory of the project.
To install dfm, just enter
sudo make install
You might want to edit the Makefile to adjust the installation paths.
To support browsing of archives, archivemount (https://github.com/cybernoid/archivemount) and rar2fs (https://github.com/hasse69/rar2fs) have to be installed:
And for the distinction of .rar files from other archives, the file utility (https://www.darwinsys.com/file/) is needed.
If you want to browse archives with the normal open action instead of pressing "a", you have to configure your file launcher to use the dfm-archive-helper. For run-mailcap, add something like that in the ~/.mailcap:
application/zip; dfm-archive-helper '%s'; needsterminal
application/x-tar; dfm-archive-helper '%s'; needsterminal
application/gzip; dfm-archive-helper '%s'; needsterminal
application/x-bzip2; dfm-archive-helper '%s'; needsterminal
application/x-xz; dfm-archive-helper '%s'; needsterminal
application/x-rar; dfm-archive-helper '%s'; needsterminal
application/x-iso9660-image; dfm-archive-helper '%s'; needsterminal
Feel free to add further types. You may also need to adjust the mime types according to distribution. Check what "file --mime-type" returns for you, if it does not work.
One advantage of using the explicit "open-archive" handler is, that you can also open archives, which aren't configured, or which are archives under the hood of another file format, e.g. Java JAR or OpenDocument files.
To start dfm, just enter
dfm
The following table shows the default key bindings. They can be configured globally in the file /etc/xdg/dfm/rc or for each user in ~/.config/dfm/rc. A command reference can be found in doc/command-reference.md. Additionally, the behaviour of the open, copy, move, delete or shell bindings can be customized through the corresponding handler scripts. See examples/handlers. If you want to change them, copy the handler scripts to ~/.config/dfm/handlers and edit them to your liking.
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
| Up | Move up |
| Down | Move down |
| PageUp | Move to the top of the screen or one page up |
| PageDown | Move to the bottom of the screen or one page down |
| Left | Go to the parent directory |
| Right | Enter the selected directory or open the selected/marked file(s) |
| Home | Go to the first file |
| End | Go to the last file |
| Space | Mark/unmark currently selected file |
| * | Invert mark status of every file |
| + | Mark all files matching the entered regular expression |
| - | Unmark all files matching the entered regular expression |
| 1 | Go to home (~) directory |
| 2 | Go to root (/) directory |
| r | Reload directory contents, mainly useful on network filesystems |
| e | Open selected or marked files for editing |
| D | Delete currently marked files, or when no file is marked the currently selected file |
| p | Copy files in clipboard to the current directory |
| P | Move files in clipboard to the current directory |
| s | Open a shell in the current direcotory |
| a | Browse contents of the selected archive |
| y | Copy currently marked files or the currently selected file to clipboard |
| q | Quit dfm |
| : | Open the command line |
| F6 | Rename currently selected file/directory |
| F7 | Create a new directory |
| / | Jump to the next file matching the entered regular expression |
| ? | Jump to the previous file matching the entered regular expression |
| n | Repeat the previous search |