Material Files vs nnn
Material Files
github.comnnn
github.comSide by side
| Figure | Material Files | nnn |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| Android | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · File Manager Software | 7.6 (#68) | 8.7 (#6) |
| Archive support | Yes | Yes |
| Founded | 2018 | 2016 |
| License | The app is distributed under the GNU General Public License version 3 or later. | The GitHub repository identifies the project license as BSD-2-Clause. |
| Navigation | It uses filesystem breadcrumbs to help navigate files and folders. | It supports contexts, sessions, bookmarks, directory marks, and remote mounts through sshfs or rclone. |
| Supported platforms | android | The project says nnn runs on Linux, macOS, Android through Termux, Cygwin, and WSL, among other environments. |
| Privacy | The privacy policy says information the app requests is retained on the device and is not collected by the developer, while third-party services may collect identifying information and error log data. | The project describes nnn as privacy-aware, with no unconfirmed user data collection. |
| Purpose | Material Files is an open-source Material Design file manager for Android 5.0 and later. | nnn is a full-featured terminal file manager. |
| Support | The Google Play listing provides a support email address: [email protected]. | The project invites users to discuss new ideas or enhancement requests in GitHub Discussions. |
Plans
In their own words
Material Files
Material Files has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.
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.