nnn vs Runa

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.

Runa is a free terminal file manager written in Rust for Linux, macOS and Windows. Its keyboard-driven interface provides dual-pane browsing, a preview pane, tabs, and actions for moving, filtering, copying and renaming files. Keybindings, colors and layout can be changed in a TOML configuration file. The project describes a multithreaded engine with dedicated worker threads for input/output, previews, search and file operations. An optional fd installation enables recursive fuzzy search across files and folders; without fd, Runa remains usable but cannot perform that search. The optional bat tool adds syntax-highlighted previews, while built-in preview methods work without it. Installation is available through Cargo, Arch Linux AUR, Homebrew, Scoop, precompiled binaries or source builds. Releases from v0.5.11 are described as immutable and include attestations and SHA256 checksums. Runa is dual licensed under MIT or Apache-2.0 and remains under active development.