elio vs Rat Commander

elio is a free, open-source terminal file manager for Linux, macOS, Windows, and self-hosted use. Its Places, Files, and Preview panes offer grid and list views, with keyboard and mouse navigation. It previews text, code, documents, archives, media, and other file types; supported terminals can display images inline. File operations include creating and extracting common archives, finding duplicates, and trashing, restoring, or permanently deleting items. Remote file access is supported. Shell wrappers for bash, zsh, fish, and Nushell can return the shell to the browsed directory when elio closes, and an optional zoxide integration opens a picker using recorded directory history. It works without extra preview tools; optional Poppler, FFmpeg, resvg, and 7-Zip tools add preview and archive capabilities. Installation methods are listed for several Linux distributions, macOS through Homebrew, FreeBSD, and Cargo. elio can be configured as a file chooser on Linux and FreeBSD.

Rat Commander is a free, two-panel terminal file manager for Linux, macOS, and Windows. It brings file browsing and media viewing together with editing, archives, Git, remote filesystems, and system tools. Panels can show files as lists, trees, thumbnail grids, or interactive 3D views, and can be split vertically or horizontally. The built-in viewer and editor support syntax highlighting, search and replace, Markdown, tables, images, and in-place hex editing. Git tools cover tasks including staging, commits, branches, diffs, and history. Remote connections over SFTP, SCP, FTP, and FTPS let users work with remote filesystems in a local-disk-like way. ZIP, TAR variants, 7z, and other archives can be browsed and edited; RAR is read-only. QR codes support sending and receiving files over a local network. Linux disk tools can mount, format, flash, and image disks and USB devices. On Windows, Drive Manager and Network Connections are unavailable. Rat Commander is written in Rust with Ratatui and is licensed under GNU GPL-2.0-only.