REX — Terminal File Manager

A fast, keyboard-driven TUI file manager written in Rust using ratatui.

Features

• ⚡ Zero-lag navigation — dirty-flag rendering, async preview loading, cached stat calls
• 🔍 Fast search — / local search, g global search (via fd), non-blocking async results
• 📋 Selection-first workflow — select multiple files with Space, then batch copy/cut/delete
• 🗂️ Open With — o opens with configured app, O shows a selection popup
• ⚙️ JSON config — map file extensions to apps in config.json
• 🗑️ Trash support — delete moves to trash with undo
• 📖 Inline help — press ? for keybind reference

Install

# Clone
git clone https://github.com/yourusername/rex.git
cd rex

# Install fd (optional but recommended — faster search)
sudo apt install fd-find   # Ubuntu/Debian
# or: sudo pacman -S fd    # Arch
# Falls back to built-in 'find' if fd is not installed

# Run
cargo run

Requires Rust ≥ 1.70

Keybinds

Navigation

File Operations

Search

General

Configuration

Edit config.json in the project root to map file extensions to apps:

{
  "rs": "nvim",
  "md": "nvim",
  "pdf": "libreoffice",
  "png": "eog",
  "mp4": "vlc",
  "mp3": "vlc"
}

• o opens with the mapped app, or xdg-open if no mapping exists
• O lets you pick from a list and saves the choice back to config.json

Architecture

src/
├── main.rs          # Event loop, key handling, async search/preview
├── app.rs           # App state (App struct, config, operations)
├── fs/
│   └── navigator.rs # Directory listing with cached is_dir flags
└── ui/
    └── layout.rs    # Rendering (ratatui widgets, popups)

Performance design:

• Preview loaded in background thread via mpsc::channel — never blocks the event loop
• Search runs fd in a background thread with AtomicBool cancellation — each keystroke cancels the previous search
• Rendering uses a needs_draw dirty flag — no redundant redraws
• Zero stat() syscalls during render — is_dir cached in Navigator

Dependencies

License

MIT