Rat Commander vs Runa

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.

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.