Vifm: A Vim-like file manager | Hacker News Reader

Vifm: A Vim-like file manager

github.com

40 pointssurrTurr11 comments

I love vifm! It honors the vim philosophy — it’s fast, configurable, and keyboard driven. I have it integrated with vim so that when I press “-“ it toggles a directory view. So seamless that it’s hard to tell that they’re separate apps.

This is one of those projects that could really use a "how does it compare to" section in the readme.

The number one question anyone who already uses a similar tool will have is, "How is it better or worse than whatever I'm already using?"

That's what I just came here to the HN comments for.

I like using vi-style keybindings for various applications.

Hence, for file managing, I had been using `vifm` for a long time and then discovered `ranger`. I switched to it due to its advanced preview capabilities and the default interface being closer to my taste.

However, said preview function (and also other functions) sometimes crashed and I recall some strange behaviour of copy operations in ranger when symlinks were involved (?). In any case, I switched back to vifm for stability reasons and have been effectively using it for years.

What I had been missing from the console file managers was a "copy & paste between windows" option. With vifm, I implemented it as a patch getting nice assistance from vifm's developer xaizek. This resulted in the (back-then) new feature `syncregs` which I have kept using ever since. Not sure if ranger came to offer something similar in the meantime :)

YMMV

You can take advantage of hybrid user interface with Win-vind you know[0]

[0]https://github.com/pit-ray/win-vind

I want to like this thing, but i always get the feeling that 1 or 2 accidental wrong keypresses could result in total chaos because i’ll have no idea what just happened to my files/folders…

(currently using Ranger)

That’s probably why emacs dired has you mark the files for deletion and execute deletion separately.

vifm allows you to rename multiple files in bulk by opening a temporary file containing one filename per line in actual vim.

Edit: apparently ranger has this feature, too.

`vidir` in moreutils [1] does exactly this.

[1]: https://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/

Ranger for me, similar but in my opinion much better.

What makes Ranger better?

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