cfiles vs nnn
cfiles
github.comnnn
github.comSide by side
| Figure | cfiles | nnn |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| Android | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · Terminal File Managers | 8.4 (#8) | 8.5 (#7) |
| Spec score · File managers | 7.9 (#18) | 8.7 (#4) |
| Dependencies | The README lists ncursesw, cp and mv, fzf, w3mimgdisplay or Überzug, mediainfo, atool, and poppler's pdftoppm as dependencies. | Optional integrations include sshfs and rclone for remote mounts, gio trash or trash-cli for trash, and advcpmv for copy and move progress. |
| File operations | The selection list supports copying, moving, renaming, moving files to trash, and removing selected files. | It can analyze disk usage, batch rename, launch apps, pick files, and copy, move, delete, archive, and link selections. |
| Founded | 2018 | 2016 |
| License | The software is licensed under the MIT License, which grants permission to use, copy, modify, publish, distribute, sublicense, and sell copies subject to its terms. | The GitHub repository identifies the project license as BSD-2-Clause. |
| Linux support | Yes | Yes |
| macOS support | Yes | Yes |
| Navigation | It supports h, j, k, and l navigation keys and offers top, middle, bottom, and page scrolling shortcuts. | It supports contexts, sessions, bookmarks, directory marks, and remote mounts through sshfs or rclone. |
| Platforms | The README gives installation instructions for Arch Linux and macOS, and says other users can compile it with make and install with sudo make install. | The project says nnn runs on Linux, macOS, Android through Termux, Cygwin, and WSL, among other environments. |
| Preview pane | Yes | Yes |
| Product | cfiles is a terminal file manager written in C with vim-like keybindings and the ncurses library. | nnn is a full-featured terminal file manager designed to be small, fast, and nearly zero-configuration. |
Plans
In their own words
cfiles
cfiles is a free terminal file manager written in C with ncurses and vim-like keybindings. It targets a ranger-like interface while remaining lightweight, fast and minimal, and runs on Linux and macOS. Navigation uses h, j, k and l, with shortcuts for top, middle, bottom and page scrolling. The f and F keys search with fzf, while S opens a shell in the current directory. File selections can be copied, moved, renamed, sent to trash or removed. Preview support covers images, media information, archives and PDFs through external dependencies. Users can save bookmarks and run executable scripts from the configured cfiles directory. Dependencies include ncursesw, cp and mv, fzf, w3mimgdisplay or Überzug, mediainfo, atool and pdftoppm. Überzug cannot preview MP3 album art and has nonfunctional arrow-key scrolling; w3mimgdisplay previews may disappear after terminal resizing or workspace changes. Trash deletion requires a specific directory, and configuration falls back to $HOME/.config when XDG_CONFIG_HOME is unset.
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.