clifm

clifm is a file manager you drive with commands, not menus. Where ranger, nnn, and lf give you a visual TUI to arrow through, clifm keeps the shell paradigm: you navigate and operate on files by typing commands, the way you already work in a terminal. Written in C, it runs almost everywhere, Linux, the BSDs, macOS, Solaris, Haiku, Cygwin, across x86, ARM, PowerPC, and RISC-V.

It's very mature, with a deep commit history, packaging in openSUSE's build service, and CodeQL and Codacy in the pipeline. This is a serious, long-maintained project, not a weekend experiment.

Free under GPL-2.0-or-later, for anyone who lives in the terminal and wants file management that matches how they already think.

The catch is the paradigm itself. "Shell-like" instead of a visual TUI is unusual, and it's a real learning curve if you're used to the menu-driven managers most people reach for. For the right person, someone fluent in the command line who finds TUIs slower than typing, it's a great fit. For everyone else, ranger or nnn will feel more natural. Try it, but know it's a deliberately different way of working.