superfar

A dual-pane file manager for Linux in the Directory Opus mould, at Thunar's weight, with FAR-style function keys. Keyboard first, one window, and it never defines a colour: whatever your platform theme says is what it looks like.

This is my file manager. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

My file manager is my best friend. Without me, my file manager is useless. Without my file manager, I am ls.

Install · Features · Screenshots · Keys · Mouse · Columns · Permissions and owner · Config · Building · Status

Why

Thunar is light but slow to improve, and Linux has had no dual-pane manager that feels native rather than borrowed from GNOME or KDE. superfar keeps the Opus workflow (tree, two panes, tabs, preview, folder sizes) and the Thunar footprint, and puts every action on a key you can see in the bar at the bottom.

Install

Each release carries two files, both built on Arch and needing its library generation (Qt 6.12, glib 2.90 and glycin 2 or newer):

• a pacman package: pacman -U superfar-*.pkg.tar.zst
• a binary tarball whose install.sh copies it under ~/.local or a prefix you name

Anywhere else, build it from source. To make it the default for folders:

xdg-mime default superfar.desktop inode/directory

Some features lean on a tool that may not be installed. Without it the window says so when you reach the feature, or the preview keeps the thumbnail; nothing else changes.

Tool	Used for
bsdtar (libarchive)	archives: open, extract, pack
tumbler	thumbnails
pdftoppm and pdfinfo (poppler)	PDF pages in the preview
ffmpeg and ffprobe	video in the preview
gvfs	the trash, mounts and network shares
xdg-terminal-exec or $TERMINAL	F4 and the command line

Features

The window

	What you get	Where
Two panes	Always open, each with its own path bar, tabs and status line; the active one is unmistakable.	Tab, Ctrl+F1, Ctrl+F2
Tabs	A tab owns its folder, history, sort, filter, marks and cursor. Tabs come back on start and can be locked.	Ctrl+T, Ctrl+W, Ctrl+Shift+L
Folder tree	One tree that follows the active tab: the filesystem, the trash, your GTK bookmarks, mounts and the network.	Shift+Tab, Ctrl+F5
Function key bar	F1 to F10 with what they do, relabelled while Shift, Ctrl or Alt is held. The menu bar stays out of the way until F9, and a right click offers the same commands for what is under the pointer.	always on screen
Columns	Size, Items, Modified, Permissions, Owner. Drag a header to reorder, right click it to choose; each pane keeps its own. Size, count and date are never cut short.	Ctrl+F6, the header

Working with files

	What you get	Where
Quick filter and marks	Just type to filter. Marks are separate from the cursor and come back when you return to a folder.	typing, Insert, Space, Ctrl+A
Copy, move, trash	A job strip inside the window: progress for items and bytes, a throughput graph, Pause, Skip and Abort, conflicts and errors as bars, and an unattended mode that logs instead of asking.	F5, F6, F8
Permissions and owner	rwxr-xr-x and user:group in the list as ls -l has them, sortable, edited in the row. For many items at once, and down their folders, in the properties panel.	F2 then Tab, Alt+F2
Archives	Open as read-only folders, extract with F5, pack the marked items into zip, tar.gz, tar.xz, tar.zst or 7z.	Enter, F5, Alt+F5
Multi-rename	Wildcards, regex, find and replace, numbering, case, presets and undo, with a live preview that calls out clashes.	Shift+F2
Folder sync	Compares the two panes by size, time and, if asked, SHA-256; copies or trashes what you check.	Shift+F5

Looking and finding

	What you get	Where
Folder counts and sizes	Item counts by default; recursive sizes and counts per tab, with partial totals while the walk runs.	Ctrl+F3, F3 on a folder
Preview	Follows the cursor in the other pane or a third slot: images, text, PDF pages, video, an archive's summary and tree, a folder's totals.	Ctrl+F8
Viewer	Any file of any size, read in windows; hex for binaries.	F3
Thumbnails	From tumbler over D-Bus, in taller rows, per tab.	Ctrl+F4
Find and go	Find in tree with the results in a tab, folder history ranked by frecency, a path or a remote URI typed in.	Alt+F7, Alt+F1, Ctrl+L
Remote and removable	sftp, smb and the rest through GVfs. Mounting asks for credentials inside the window; F8 on a mount unmounts or ejects it.	Ctrl+L, the tree

How it behaves

	What you get	Where
Plays well with others	Clipboard and drag and drop speak the formats other file managers do; the command line runs in the tab's folder in your terminal.	Ctrl+C, Ctrl+X, Ctrl+V, Ctrl+Space
Nothing pops up	Progress, questions, passwords, the open-with list and errors are bars inside the one window.
Your theme	No colour of its own: what the platform theme says (qt6ct, Kvantum, Fusion) is what it looks like.
Light	One process, no indexer, no daemon. About 5 MB of its own memory with an empty window, under 50 MB with a 100,000-entry folder open.

Nothing decodes media or documents inside the process: images go through libglycin's sandbox, PDF pages through pdftoppm and video frames through ffmpeg in child processes (video plays without sound), archives through bsdtar, thumbnails through tumbler.

Screenshots

Click one for its full size.

Permissions and owner as columns; F2 opens the name, Tab moves to the row's mode	Properties on Alt+F2 over several marked items: bits they differ in are half checked and stay
The column list on Ctrl+F6: Space shows or hides, Shift+Up and Shift+Down move	Recursive folder sizes on Ctrl+F3, computed in the background
The preview on Ctrl+F8, following the cursor	A PDF in the preview, paged with Ctrl+PgUp and Ctrl+PgDown or the buttons
A video in the preview, playing after Ctrl+P, without sound; the same keys seek	The F3 viewer on a binary file
Multi-rename on Shift+F2, the clashes called out before anything is renamed	Folder sync on Shift+F5, comparing the two panes
An archive opened as a folder, its tab named after it	Find in tree on Alt+F7, results in a tab
Folder history on Alt+F1, ranked by frecency	Thumbnails on Ctrl+F4, from tumbler through the freedesktop cache

Keys

Almost everything is on a function key, in four layers, and the bar at the bottom shows the layer of whatever modifier you hold, naming the modifier at its left end. Shift is a variant of the plain key, Ctrl is what the pane shows, Alt is panels and tools:

	F1	F2	F3	F4	F5	F6	F7	F8	F9	F10
plain	help	rename	view	edit	copy	move	new folder	trash	menu	quit
Shift	about	multi-rename	open with	new file	sync			delete
Ctrl	left pane	right pane	sizes	thumbnails	tree	columns	hidden files	preview
Alt	go to	properties			pack	bookmark	find

F1 shows the full table inside the window, with whatever you have remapped. The defaults by subject, with the keys other file managers use kept as second keys:

Files

Key	Action
Enter	open with the default app; on a folder or an archive, enter it
Shift+F3, Shift+Enter	choose an app to open with
F2	rename inline; Tab moves on to the row's permissions and owner when those columns are shown
Shift+F2	multi-rename panel
F3	view; on a folder, compute its size
F4	edit in a terminal ($VISUAL, $EDITOR, else nvim, vim, nano or vi)
F5, F6	copy, move to the other pane (F5 inside an archive extracts)
Shift+F5	folder sync panel
Alt+F5	pack the marked items into a new archive (zip, tar.gz, tar.xz, tar.zst, 7z) in the other pane
F7, Shift+F4	new folder, new file
F8, Shift+F8	trash, delete permanently
Alt+F2, Alt+Enter	properties, with permissions and owner for every marked item
Ctrl+C, Ctrl+X, Ctrl+V	clipboard, shared with other file managers

Marks and filter

Key	Action
Insert, Shift+Down	mark and move down
Shift+Up	mark and move up
Space, Ctrl+A, *	mark, mark all, invert
Ctrl+=, Ctrl+-	mark and unmark by pattern
Ctrl+Shift+A	clear the marks (a folder's marks come back when you return to it)
any text	filters the current tab; Backspace edits the filter while one is set, Space appends to it
Esc	clear the filter, close the viewer or panel, close the preview, then clear the marks

Moving around

Key	Action
Backspace, Left	go up
Right	enter the folder
Ctrl+L	type a path or URI
Alt+F1, Ctrl+G	go to a folder from history
Alt+F7	find in tree
Alt+F6, Ctrl+D	bookmark this folder, or remove the bookmark
Ctrl+R	reload the folder
Tab, Shift+Tab	switch panes, focus the tree
F8 in the tree	on a mount: unmount it, or eject it when it is removable

Panes, tabs and what they show

Key	Action
Ctrl+T, Ctrl+W	new tab, close tab
Ctrl+Tab, Ctrl+Shift+Tab	next tab, previous tab
Ctrl+Shift+L	lock the tab: navigation opens a new tab
Ctrl+F1, Ctrl+F2	hide the left or right pane
Ctrl+F5	hide or show the folder tree
Ctrl+F3, Ctrl+F4	recursive sizes and counts, thumbnails for this tab
Ctrl+F6	the pane's columns as a list: Space shows or hides one, Shift+Up and Shift+Down move it
Ctrl+F7, Ctrl+H	show hidden files

Preview

Key	Action
Ctrl+F8, Ctrl+Q	preview the cursor item
Ctrl+Home, Ctrl+PgUp, Ctrl+PgDown, Ctrl+End	previewed PDF: first, previous, next, last page; video: start, back 10 s, forward 10 s, end
Ctrl+P	previewed video: play or pause

The strip under the preview's details has the same buttons and a playhead.

Help, menu and command line

Key	Action
F1, Shift+F1	help; about: name, version and build date
F9	the menu bar until a choice or Esc
F10	quit, keeping the session
Ctrl+Space	the command line: runs in the tab's folder in a terminal

Mouse

• Right click brings a short menu of what the keys do for the thing under it, each entry with its key beside it: an item of the list (the marked items when there are marks; the menu's first line says which), the list's empty space (new folder, paste, what the pane shows), a tab, a folder or a mount in the tree.
• Column headers: a click sorts and a second click reverses it (folders stay first), a drag moves the column, an edge resizes it, a right click lists the columns.
• Tabs: middle click closes one; a double click on the empty strip opens one at home.
• Path bar: a double click edits the path (the same as Ctrl+L, for a remote location).
• Drag and drop: files drag between panes, onto tree folders and to other apps, and drops from other apps are accepted.

Columns

Name, Size, Items, Modified, Permissions and Owner; the last two are off until you switch them on. Ctrl+F6 lists a pane's columns: Space shows or hides one, Shift+Up and Shift+Down move it, and Reset columns at the bottom goes back to the defaults. The header does the same with the mouse. Name stays first and stays shown; when a pane is too narrow for its columns the list scrolls sideways instead of cutting them off.

Each pane keeps its own columns and remembers them in the state file. The config can give a pane a starting point, which applies until you change that pane's columns in the window (Reset columns brings it back):

[columns/left]
order=name,permissions,owner,modified
hidden=size,items

The names are name, size, items, modified, permissions and owner. Listing Permissions or Owner in order= switches it on.

Permissions and owner

Switch the two columns on from the header's list. In a row, F2 opens the name and Tab moves to the mode and then the owner (Shift+Tab goes back, Up and Down move to the next row in the same column). The mode takes the nine letters or octal, setuid, setgid and sticky included (rwsr-xr-x, 2755); the owner takes user:group, user or :group, names or numbers, and completes names as you type. A row over a link shows its target, and that is what an edit there changes.

The properties panel (Alt+F2, or Alt+Enter) does the same for everything marked. Apply runs as a job in the strip, with progress, Abort and a log of what was refused. With "the contents of folders too" checked it goes down the tree the careful way: folders take the bits as set, a file takes execute only where it already has one, links are never followed and another filesystem mounted below is left alone. Only root can give a file to another user; anyone can change the group to one of their own.

Config

Two files, so a dotfile manager can own the first without seeing churn from the second:

File	Holds	Written by
~/.config/superfar/superfar.ini	keys, a starting point for the columns, layout choices	you; the app writes the default keys on first run, adds a line when a version brings a new command, and updates a line still at an old default
~/.local/state/superfar/state.ini	the session, the folder history, window and splitter sizes, each pane's columns	the app

[keys]
Copy=F5
GoUp="Backspace;Left"

[layout]
split=side-by-side
preview=borrow

• [keys] has one line per command. A line with more than one key needs its quotes, since an unquoted semicolon starts a comment; an empty value unbinds the command.
• [layout]: split is side-by-side or stacked; preview is borrow (the other pane) or third (a slot of its own).
• [columns/left] and [columns/right]: see Columns.

Building from source

Qt 6 (Core, Gui, Widgets, DBus), GLib and GIO 2.74 or newer, libglycin 2, CMake 3.28, Ninja and a C++23 compiler:

cmake -S . -B build -G Ninja
cmake --build build
ctest --test-dir build
build/src/app/superfar [left-folder [right-folder]]

cmake --install build --prefix ~/.local installs the binary, the desktop entry and the icon. tools/mkpkg.sh and tools/mktarball.sh build the two release files from a checkout.

Status and limits

All twelve milestones of the plan are done; CLAUDE.md holds the rules the code follows. Non-goals: plugins, theming beyond the platform theme, an embedded terminal, a search index, translations before 1.0. Nothing decodes media or documents in the process: thumbnails come from tumbler, PDF pages and video frames from poppler and ffmpeg in child processes.

Known limits: copies go through GIO, which writes the holes of a sparse file out as zeros (Nautilus and Thunar do the same). Drag and drop, mounting with credentials and remote shares have had the least testing.

Licence

MIT.