Terminal-based Linux file managers to try when a GUI isn't available

ZDNET highlights a selection of free terminal-based file managers for Linux for situations when a graphical user interface is impractical or unavailable. Midnight Commander (MC) is presented as a long-standing, full-featured option with mouse integration (though the mouse cannot open files), built-in support for text editors, dual-pane viewing, batch renaming, FTP support, Unicode support and remote access via SSH.

The outlet notes you can install MC from standard repositories with commands such as: Ubuntu/Debian-based distributions - sudo apt-get install mc -y; Fedora-based distributions - sudo dnf install mc -y; Arch-based distributions - sudo pacman -S mc. ZDNET also covers Yazi, a Rust-written manager the author prefers for honoring system themes and speed; it includes image preview support, code highlighting, image decoding and a plug-in system.

The article cautions that image previews are only supported in specific terminals such as Ghostty, iTerm2, Konsole, Tabby and Bobcat, and that using a different terminal will cause a fallback to X11 or Wayland with pixellated previews. Yazi can be installed with Flatpak using the command: flatpak install yazi4.

Key Topics

Tech, Midnight Commander, Yazi, Ranger, Nnn, Flatpak