rust commander (rc)

rust commander is a Rust terminal file manager inspired by GNU Midnight Commander. It keeps the familiar dual-pane workflow and MC-style default keybindings while adding responsive background operations, a modal shell prompt, and fast directory navigation.

Features

Panels and navigation

• Two independent directory panels with Full, Brief, and Long layouts.
• Browse ZIP, TAR, gzip TAR, and bzip2 TAR archives as read-only folders, with normal navigation, sorting, filtering, and tagging.
• Native filesystem notifications automatically refresh both panels and the open directory tree, including changes made by other programs. Updates are coalesced and scanned in the background while preserving selection and tags.
• Per-panel sorting, reverse order, glob or regular-expression filters, hidden-file control, and persisted configuration.
• Tagging for batch operations, recursive selection totals, responsive Brief-mode columns, and mouse selection or activation.
• Quick view and file information in the passive panel.
• Quick CD for exact paths, ~, Unix ~user, cd -, and ranked case-insensitive directory search.
• Directory tree navigation with static or dynamic movement, incremental search, subtree rescan, and subtree forgetting.
• A labeled, persistent directory hotlist with add, edit, remove, and quick-add.

Files and jobs

• Copy, move, rename, mkdir, and delete for individual or tagged entries.
• Background execution with progress, cancellation, overwrite policies, and a jobs screen.
• Metadata preservation, symlink-aware operations, validation against recursive destinations, and rollback when an overwrite fails.
• Incremental, cancelable directory refreshes that preserve selection and tags.

Archives

Press Enter on a .zip, .tar, .tar.gz (.tgz), or .tar.bz2 (.tbz2, .tbz) file to browse it in the current pane. Extensions are case-insensitive. Enter opens folders and previews files; F3 and Quick view also preview files. Backspace or .. goes up, leaving the archive at its root. Normal sorting, filtering, hidden-file control, and tagging work inside archives. Unsorted mode follows archive order. Inferred folders use their newest descendant's modification time for date sorting.

Use F5 to copy selected or tagged files and directories to a local directory. Only selected files and the descendants of selected directories are written. Copy jobs support progress, cancellation, and Skip, Rename, and Overwrite policies. Move, delete, rename, edit, mkdir, and copying into archives are blocked; archive panes are labeled read-only. The command line, Find, directory tree, external panelize, and adding the current directory to the hotlist require a local directory.

ZIP browsing reads directory metadata without decompressing payloads. Plain TAR browsing reads headers and seeks past payloads. Opening a compressed TAR for the first time requires a cancellable decompression scan to build its directory and seek index. No temporary directory tree or full decompressed TAR is written. Indexes are shared between panes and reused for navigation, sorting, size totals, and previews/copies during the session. Gzip reads resume from decoder checkpoints; bzip2 reads decode the required blocks and reuse one block per reader. Reading a selected file may therefore also decompress preceding bytes in its checkpoint interval or compression block. ZIP copies decompress only selected entries.

The archive cache retains up to eight recent indexes with a soft 64 MiB budget; gzip checkpoint memory is separately bounded by adapting checkpoint spacing as archives grow. A large metadata index can exceed the soft budget to keep navigation usable. Indexes are invalidated when the source file's identity, size, or timestamps change. Use manual refresh to update an open pane after external changes.

ZIP Stored/Deflate entries and TAR regular files/directories are supported, including GNU long names and PAX paths, sizes, and modification times. Repeated TAR names use the last record. Encrypted ZIP contents, archive symlinks, hard links, sparse files, special files, and nested archive browsing are not supported for viewing/extraction. Unsafe member paths are omitted.

On Unix, member paths retain their original bytes, including non-UTF-8 names; display labels may contain replacement characters. Unsupported names produce an explicit error during indexing or extraction. Directory copies restore an overwritten destination if its filesystem cannot represent a member name.

Archive panes and jobs use a common read-only backend interface in crates/core/src/archive. Container backends supply immutable metadata and member readers; TAR compression readers supply indexed seeking independently. Adding another format does not require format-specific navigation, viewer, or copy flows. This archive layer does not yet provide the unified local/remote VFS or nested mounts described in the roadmap.

Automatic refresh uses FSEvents on macOS, inotify on Linux, and ReadDirectoryChangesW on Windows. Watches are shared across directory aliases; the tree only refreshes affected cached subtrees. Native notifications may be unavailable on network or virtual filesystems; use manual refresh there. Watch registration failures are reported in the status line and retried in the background. Writes to the active tracing log are excluded from automatic invalidations so refresh logging cannot trigger another refresh. Log creation, deletion, and renaming still update the panels.

Find and panelize

• Filename search with shell patterns or regular expressions.
• Optional content search, whole-word matching, ignored directories, pause, cancellation, and bounded partial-result reporting.
• Find results can be opened directly or placed into a panel.
• External panelize streams command output into a virtual panel and supports named, persistent presets and per-panel result history.

Viewer and external programs

• Internal text and hex viewer with syntax highlighting, search in both directions, goto, wrapping, and bounded previews for large files.
• External editing through a configured command, $EDITOR, $VISUAL, or detected editors (hx, nvim, vim, vi, emacs).
• Executables run in the terminal; documents open with the operating system's configured application and fall back to the internal viewer when needed.
• Terminal state is restored around foreground programs and after fatal errors.

Unix command line

• > opens a modal prompt in the active panel directory.
• Fish-aware or generic completion, live prefix filtering, bounded history, and draft preservation.
• Successful literal cd commands refresh and synchronize the active panel.
• Alt-Enter / Ctrl-Enter inserts the selected name, Ctrl-Shift-Enter inserts its full path, and Ctrl-X t / Ctrl-X Ctrl-T inserts tagged names from either panel.
• Panel-derived arguments are quoted literally for the configured shell.
• The bottom hint bar switches to prompt actions, and F1 opens contextual command-line help without discarding the draft.

Configuration and interface

• MC-style top menus, contextual help, mouse support, and a parsed mc.default.keymap with user overrides.
• Bundled MC skins plus custom and system skin discovery.
• Typed settings for layout, panels, confirmations, appearance, display, shell, and command history.
• Atomic settings persistence and terminal-safe tracing.

Installation

Requirements:

• Rust 1.88.0 or newer
• A terminal with ANSI support

Install from crates.io:

cargo install rust-commander --locked

The package is named rust-commander; the installed executable is rc.

Run a local checkout with:

cargo run -p rust-commander --locked

Useful launch options:

rc --path /some/start/dir --tick-rate-ms 200
rc --skin modarin256
rc --skin julia256 --skin-dir /path/to/mc/skins

Settings

The Options menu configures layout, panels, confirmations, appearance, display, and setup persistence.

Settings use this precedence:

built-in defaults -> persisted configuration -> environment -> CLI

Save setup writes rc-owned settings to ~/.config/rc/settings.ini and the MC-compatible skin choice to ~/.config/mc/ini.

Runtime tracing is written to ~/.config/rc/rc.log. Set RC_LOG_FILE to use another path and RUST_LOG to change the default warn filter. The log is kept away from the terminal so diagnostics cannot corrupt the alternate-screen interface.

Default controls

File manager

Keys	Action
Tab	Switch active panel
Enter	Enter a directory or archive, run an executable, or open a document
Backspace	Go to the parent directory
Space / Insert / Ctrl-T	Toggle the selected entry
/ / Alt-C	Open Quick CD
>	Open the Unix command line
F3	View the selected file internally
F4	Edit with the configured external editor
F5 / F6 / F7 / F8	Copy / move or rename / mkdir / delete
Ctrl-J / Alt-J	Open jobs / cancel the latest or selected job
Alt-F / Alt-? / Ctrl-/	Find files
Alt-T	Open the directory tree
Alt-H	Open the directory hotlist
Alt-P / Ctrl-P / Ctrl-X !	Open external panelize
Ctrl-X i / Ctrl-X q	Show Info / Quick view in the passive panel
Ctrl-X y	Copy the active selected entry's full path to the clipboard
Alt-Shift-T	Cycle Full, Brief, and Long panel layouts
Shift-F6 / Shift-F8	Cycle sort field / reverse sort order
F9	Open the menu bar
q / Esc / F10	Quit

Left-click an entry in either pane to select it and make that pane active. Double-click to open the entry.

Command line

Keys	Action
Tab / Shift-Tab	Complete and cycle candidates
Up / Down	Browse command history
Enter	Accept a completion or run the command
Alt-Enter / Ctrl-Enter	Insert the active panel's selected name
Ctrl-Shift-Enter	Insert the selected entry's full path
Ctrl-X t	Insert active-panel tagged names, or its selected name
Ctrl-X Ctrl-T	Insert passive-panel tagged names, or its selected name
Ctrl-X y	Copy the active selected entry's full path to the clipboard
F1	Open command-line help
Esc	Return to the panels while preserving the draft

Find, tree, hotlist, and panelize

• Find results: F4 searches again, F5 panelizes, F6 pauses or continues, and Alt-J cancels the search.
• Tree: arrows navigate; F2 rescans, F3 forgets a subtree, F4 changes navigation mode, and F5–F8 perform file operations.
• Hotlist: a adds, e / F4 edits, d / Delete removes, and Enter opens.
• Panelize presets: Tab selects custom input, F2 adds, F4 edits, F8 removes, and Enter runs.

Viewer

Keys	Action
F7 / Ctrl-S	Search forward
Shift-F7	Search backward
n / Shift-N	Continue forward / backward
g / Alt-L	Go to a line or offset
w	Toggle wrapping
h	Toggle text / hex mode
Esc / q / F10	Close

Default bindings live in crates/core/assets/mc.default.keymap. Common macOS Option-symbol variants are normalized before keymap matching.

Platform behavior

The modal command line is available on Unix. Foreground commands receive their own terminal process group so Ctrl-C interrupts the command without terminating rc. Windows foreground programs retain normal console interrupt behavior while rc temporarily handles control events in the parent.

Linux desktop opens prefer the desktop portal. Accepted legacy launchers are reaped independently and are not terminated when rc exits.

Clipboard copying uses the OSC 52 terminal sequence. The terminal emulator and any intermediate multiplexer must allow OSC 52 clipboard writes.

Project layout

• crates/app (rust-commander): terminal lifecycle, event loop, and input normalization
• crates/core (rust-commander-core): state, commands, routes, jobs, and filesystem workflows
• crates/platform (rust-commander-platform): platform-specific terminal and process integration
• crates/ui (rust-commander-ui): Ratatui rendering and skin support
• crates/shell (rust-commander-shell): shell selection, completion, and cancelable process primitives
• ROADMAP.md: remaining product work

Development

With cargo-nextest installed, run the same baseline checks used by CI:

cargo fmt --all -- --check
cargo clippy --workspace --all-targets --all-features --locked -- -D warnings
cargo nextest run --workspace --all-targets --all-features --locked

Security, dependency-policy, coverage, and release-package checks live in scripts/ and .github/workflows/.

License

GPL-3.0-or-later, as the project derives from Midnight Commander. See LICENSE for the complete terms.