nnn vs Sally
nnn
github.comSally
github.comSide by side
| Figure | nnn | Sally |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| Android | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · File Manager Software | 8.7 (#6) | 7.9 (#44) |
| Archive support | Yes | Yes |
| Dual-pane layout | No | Yes |
| License | The GitHub repository identifies the project license as BSD-2-Clause. | The project identifies Sally as modified Open Salamander software licensed under GPLv2. |
| Platforms | The project says nnn runs on Linux, macOS, Android through Termux, Cygwin, and WSL, among other environments. | Windows |
| Plugins | Language-agnostic plugins can add capabilities such as live previews, disk mounting, file comparison, and uploads. | Bundled plugins include archive tools, FTP Client, File Comparator, Checksum, DiskMap, Registry Editor, viewers, and automation tools. |
| Privacy | The project describes nnn as privacy-aware, with no unconfirmed user data collection. | The project describes Sally as having no ads and no telemetry. |
| Product | nnn is a full-featured terminal file manager designed to be small, fast, and nearly zero-configuration. | Sally is a fast, keyboard-first dual-panel file manager for Windows power users. |
| Support | The project invites users to discuss new ideas or enhancement requests in GitHub Discussions. | The maintainer invites bug reports, focused testing, translation help, feature requests, and donations. |
Plans
In their own words
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.