Broot vs nnn
Broot
dystroy.orgnnn
github.comSide by side
| Figure | Broot | nnn |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| Android | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · Terminal File Managers | 8.6 (#2) | 8.5 (#7) |
| Spec score · File managers | 8.3 (#12) | 8.7 (#4) |
| Archive support | No | Yes |
| Dual-pane layout | Yes | No |
| File operations | Move, copy, remove, and mkdir operations are built in, and users can add shortcuts. | It can analyze disk usage, batch rename, launch apps, pick files, and copy, move, delete, archive, and link selections. |
| License | The repository is released under the MIT License, with permission to use, copy, modify, publish, distribute, sublicense, and sell the software subject to the license conditions. | The GitHub repository identifies the project license as BSD-2-Clause. |
| Linux support | Yes | Yes |
| macOS support | Yes | Yes |
| Navigation | Users can select a directory and return to the shell with that directory as the current location. | It supports contexts, sessions, bookmarks, directory marks, and remote mounts through sshfs or rclone. |
| Preview pane | Yes | Yes |
| Purpose | Broot is a way to navigate directories, find files, and launch commands. | nnn is a full-featured terminal file manager. |
| Search | It supports relevance-based search, regular expressions, content search, and logical search operators. | It supports search-as-you-type and fuzzy, regex, and string filters. |
| Support | The maker provides contact by email and invites users to chat through Miaou. | The project invites users to discuss new ideas or enhancement requests in GitHub Discussions. |
| Windows support | Yes | No |
Plans
In their own words
Broot
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.
nnn
nnn is a terminal file manager designed to be small, fast and nearly zero-configuration. It handles copying, moving, deleting, archiving and linking selections, alongside batch renaming, disk-usage analysis, app launching and file picking. Navigation includes contexts, sessions, bookmarks and directory marks, while search options include instant filtering, fuzzy matching, regular expressions and string filters. It provides directory and text previews, and can create, list, extract and mount archives. Plugins can add functions such as live previews, disk mounting, file comparison and uploads. Remote mounts require optional sshfs or rclone dependencies. The project says nnn typically needs less than 3.5 MB of resident memory; it has no configuration file and uses defaults, with optional environment-variable settings. It is free and open source under the BSD-2-Clause license, and is listed for Android, Linux, macOS and Windows. The project offers packages and a statically linked binary, or users can compile it from source.