Bosum

The ship's officer who actually gets the work done.

Bosum is a two-panel file manager in the Norton Commander tradition, built for developers. It comes as a terminal app (Rust + Ratatui) and a desktop app (Tauri + Svelte 5). Both run on one shared Rust core and read the same config file.

• Norton Commander at heart. Blue panels, F-key bar, command line, and NC's keys by default.
• Git in every panel. oh-my-posh style branch, ahead/behind, staged/modified/untracked counts and stashes, plus a glyph per file (Nerd Font, or ASCII).
• Search like Everything. Every file name on the machine sits in RAM and queries run in parallel: about 1.4M files index in ~0.2 s and answer in under 10 ms.
• Configurable. Key bindings, color schemes, glyphs, user menu and fonts all live in one TOML file.

Find file: every file on the machine, in milliseconds	Desktop app: sidebar, tabs, color tags, git
Desktop app: Miller columns and preview, light theme

Install

Terminal app, one command:

brew install mwo-dk/bosum/bosum                                                    # macOS, Linux
scoop bucket add bosum https://github.com/mwo-dk/scoop-bosum; scoop install bosum   # Windows

Desktop app (macOS, Linux x86-64): brew install --cask mwo-dk/bosum/bosum-gui

Download: pick your platform under Releases. The builds are not code-signed; the release notes say how to get past the first-run warning on Windows and macOS.

Build from source:

git clone https://github.com/mwo-dk/bosum.git
cd bosum
./install/install.sh                                          # Linux, macOS
powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File install\install.ps1  # Windows

The script offers to install Rust and Node.js when they are missing, and asks first. See install/INSTALL.md. For development: cargo run -p bosum, or cd gui && npm ci && npx tauri dev.

Git glyphs need a Nerd Font. In the terminal, use one as your terminal font; the GUI picks up any installed Nerd Font listed in gui.icon_font. Without one, set glyphs = "ascii".

Keys (defaults)

Typing goes to the command line. Enter runs it in the panel's directory, and cd works. Both apps support the mouse: click, double-click, right-click to mark, and the wheel. The GUI also does Shift-click ranges, drag-and-drop between panels, and clickable column headers and paths.

Using Bosum

Start either app with up to two folders: bosum ~/src ~/Downloads or bosum-gui .. Without arguments both panels open in the current folder (the desktop app restores your last session).

The NC way. One panel is active. Move with the arrows, Enter opens a folder or file, and Backspace goes up. Mark files with Insert (or + with a pattern like *.rs), then F5 copies or F6 moves them to the other panel's folder. With nothing marked, the file under the cursor is used. F3 views, F4 opens your $EDITOR, F8 moves to the trash (after asking), and Shift+F8 deletes for good. F9 opens a searchable list of every command, so you never need to remember a key.

Reading the git line. Inside a repository the panel's bottom line shows the branch, commits ahead/behind the upstream, and counts of staged, modified and untracked files and stashes. Each file and folder gets the same glyph, so a changed file deep in src/ marks src too. Ignored files get a crossed-out eye.

Find file (Alt+F7 or Ctrl+F). Start typing; results update per key. Enter jumps to the file with the cursor on it, F3 and F4 view and edit it in place, and Tab limits the search to the current folder. The first start builds the index in the background; after that it is loaded from disk and kept current while Bosum runs.

Desktop app extras (all rebindable, like everything else):

Folders reread themselves when something changes in them. Drag files to the other pane, to another application, or in from one; Bosum asks whether to copy or move.

The sidebar holds places, drives with free space, favorite groups (right-click a group, then "Add current folder") and the git repositories you visited recently. Pick a theme from the F9 command list (type "theme").

Find file

Everything's syntax:

Tab switches between searching everywhere and the current directory only.

Configuration

bosum --config-path shows where the file lives (~/.config/bosum/config.toml on Linux). bosum --dump-config prints every option with its default. Set only what you want to change:

theme = "midnight"          # or "nc", or your own [themes.<name>]
glyphs = "nerd"             # or "ascii"
editor = "hx"               # else $VISUAL / $EDITOR

[keys]
quit = ["F10", "Ctrl+Q"]    # listing an action replaces its default keys
search = ["Ctrl+P"]

[themes.mine.panel]         # unset slots fall back to the NC scheme
fg = "#e0e0e0"
bg = "#101820"

[[user_menu]]               # F2; %f file, %d dir, %s selection (shell-quoted)
key = "t"
label = "cargo test"
command = "cargo test"
wait = true

[search]
exclude = ["/proc", "/sys", "node_modules"]   # a path skips a tree; a bare name skips every such directory
watch = true

[gui]
font_size = 15

How search stays fast

The index (crates/bosum-core/src/index.rs) keeps each name once in a \0-separated byte buffer, with a 12-byte node per entry (parent, offset, length, flags). A query runs a single SIMD memmem scan over that buffer, split across all cores. Full paths are built only for hits. The index is saved to the cache directory, so it loads in ~90 ms on the next start. It is then rebuilt in the background and kept current by file system events (inotify, FSEvents, ReadDirectoryChangesW).

Run cargo run --release -p bosum-core --example bench -- / to measure it on your machine.

Known limits and upgrade paths:

• Linux: inotify needs one watch per directory. Past fs.inotify.max_user_watches, the hourly rebuild catches changes. fanotify would remove that limit, but it needs root.
• Windows: the first index comes from a directory walk. Reading the MFT and USN journal directly, as Everything does, would make cold starts faster.

Layout

crates/bosum-core   config, fs ops, git status, search index (shared)
crates/bosum-tui    terminal UI (package and binary: bosum)
gui/                Svelte 5 frontend
gui/src-tauri       Tauri backend (binary: bosum-gui)

License

MIT

Norton Commander is a trademark of Gen Digital Inc. Bosum is an independent project, not affiliated with or endorsed by Gen Digital.