Broot vs FModel

Broot is a directory navigator for finding files, browsing folders, and launching commands. It runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows, with a dual-pane layout and synchronized preview panels. Directory overviews respect .gitignore and .ignore files. Search supports relevance ranking, regular expressions, file contents, and logical operators. Users can select a directory and return to the shell with that location active. Built-in file operations include move, copy, remove, and mkdir, and users can add shortcuts. Multiple panels support navigation and moving or copying items between locations, with customizable colors. Preview options include PDF and Office documents through transformers and high-resolution images through Kitty's graphics protocol in Kitty and WezTerm. A staging area lets users run commands across several files. For space analysis, sorting by size or date and whale-spotting mode help locate large items; sizes, dates, and file counts are calculated in the background. Git views show file states, branch, upstream divergence, and change statistics. Client-server mode uses Unix sockets and is available only on Unix-like systems. Broot is free under the MIT License, with source and precompiled binaries available.

FModel is free, open-source Windows software for exploring and extracting content from games made with Unreal Engine. It can browse game archives, including encrypted ones, and compare two archive states to identify new or modified packages; encrypted archives require an AES key. It parses more than 30 asset types, displays their properties and offers image, audio and 3D viewing for supported content. Package properties can be shown in formats including JSON, INI, XML and TXT, and models can be saved as PSK files. An Export Session window supports batching raw data, model, world, texture and animation exports. The August 2026 release added USD export for meshes, animations, materials and worlds, plus WebP export and texture quality settings. Whole-level export is in USDA format, and sockets or attachments may not always be placed correctly. FModel is distributed as a portable x64 executable in a ZIP archive. It requires .NET 10.0 or later, and some games may require up to 2 GB of free RAM.