Yazi

Canonical version: Yazi.

Yazi is a terminal file manager written in Rust, built from the ground up on async I/O. The name means "duck" in Chinese. Where classic terminal file managers (Ranger, nnn, lf) block on slow operations, Yazi schedules everything asynchronously across threads: copying a huge directory, generating previews, and browsing stay smooth simultaneously, with real-time progress and cancellable tasks.

What stands out:

• Previews that actually work in a terminal — images (via multiple image protocols, Überzug++ included), video thumbnails, PDFs, archives, and syntax-highlighted code, all pre-cached so navigation feels instant.
• Vim-style navigation — hjkl movement, visual mode, and keybindings that feel immediately familiar if you live in Neovim.
• Lua plugin system — previewers, fetchers, and UI tweaks are scriptable; there's a healthy ecosystem of community plugins and flavors (themes).
• Terminal-native integrations — plays nicely with TMux, zoxide for jumping, fzf for fuzzy finding, and modern terminals like Ghostty and Alacritty.

It fits the current wave of Rust rewrites of classic Unix tools: same job as the old guard, dramatically better defaults and speed. On Omarchy and any keyboard-centric Linux setup, it's the natural file manager choice.

References

• Website: https://yazi-rs.github.io/
• Docs: https://yazi-rs.github.io/docs/installation
• Blog: https://yazi-rs.github.io/blog
• GitHub: https://github.com/sxyazi/yazi

Related

• Rust
• Vim
• Neovim
• TMux
• Ghostty
• Alacritty
• Omarchy

About Sébastien

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