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Dynamic File Manager

Dynamic File Manager (dfm) is a simple ncurses based file manager. It is inspired by ranger but tries to keep the user interface much simpler and memory footprint as well a CPU usage low.

Features

• Uses inotify to always show an accurate view of the current directory
• Delegates file actions (open, copy, move, delete) to external scripts. The default scripts use see (run-mailcap), cp, mv and rm to perform the requested actions.
• Remembers the last selected file in every directory to quickly navigate to previously visited paths
• Filtered view: Show only files/directories matching a regular expression, i.e. certain file types. Can also be used to exclude dot-files.
• Shared clipboard: Multiple instances of dfm can share a clipboard if the environment variable DFM_CLIPBOARD_DIR is set to a writable directory. This way you can emulate tabs with screen mutliplexers or mutliple xterns running several dfm instances
• Browse archives with the help of FUSE. Archives are temporarily mounted, then a new instance of dfm launches in the mount point, and after this new instance is exited, the archive is unmounted

Installation

Building dfm requires wide-char enabled ncurses. To build just invoke

make

in the toplevel directory of the project.

To install dfm, just enter

sudo make install

You might want to edit the Makefile to adjust the installation paths.

Archive support

To support browsing of archives, archivemount (https://github.com/cybernoid/archivemount) and rar2fs (https://github.com/hasse69/rar2fs) have to be installed:

And for the distinction of .rar files from other archives, the file utility (https://www.darwinsys.com/file/) is needed.

If you want to browse archives with the normal open action instead of pressing "a", you have to configure your file launcher to use the dfm-archive-helper. For run-mailcap, add something like that in the ~/.mailcap:

application/zip; dfm-archive-helper '%s'; needsterminal
application/x-tar; dfm-archive-helper '%s'; needsterminal
application/gzip; dfm-archive-helper '%s'; needsterminal
application/x-bzip2; dfm-archive-helper '%s'; needsterminal
application/x-xz; dfm-archive-helper '%s'; needsterminal
application/x-rar; dfm-archive-helper '%s'; needsterminal
application/x-iso9660-image; dfm-archive-helper '%s'; needsterminal

Feel free to add further types. You may also need to adjust the mime types according to distribution. Check what "file --mime-type" returns for you, if it does not work.

One advantage of using the explicit "open-archive" handler is, that you can also open archives, which aren't configured, or which are archives under the hood of another file format, e.g. Java JAR or OpenDocument files.

Usage

To start dfm, just enter

dfm

The following table shows the default key bindings. They can be configured globally in the file /etc/xdg/dfm/rc or for each user in ~/.config/dfm/rc. A command reference can be found in doc/command-reference.md. Additionally, the behaviour of the open, copy, move, delete or shell bindings can be customized through the corresponding handler scripts. See examples/handlers. If you want to change them, copy the handler scripts to ~/.config/dfm/handlers and edit them to your liking.