Site Map - skip to main content

Hacker Public Radio

Your ideas, projects, opinions - podcasted.

New episodes every weekday Monday through Friday.
This page was generated by The HPR Robot at

hpr1756 :: Ranger File Manager

Introduction to the ranger command line file manager

<< First, < Previous, , Latest >>

Thumbnail of Mr. Young
Hosted by Mr. Young on 2015-04-27 is flagged as Clean and is released under a CC-BY-SA license.
ranger, file manager, console. 1.
The show is available on the Internet Archive at: https://archive.org/details/hpr1756

Listen in ogg, spx, or mp3 format. Play now:

Duration: 00:22:20

general.

From Man Page:

DESCRIPTION
ranger is a console file manager with VI key bindings. It provides a minimalistic and nice curses interface with a view on the directory hierarchy. The secondary task of ranger is to figure out which program you want to use to open your files with.

This manual mainly contains information on the usage of ranger. Refer to the README for install instructions and to doc/HACKING for development specific information. For configuration, see the files in ranger/config. They are usually installed to /etc/ranger/config and can be obtained with ranger's --copy-config option.

Inside ranger, you can press 1? for a list of key bindings, 2? for a list of commands and 3? for a list of settings.

  • Project page: https://ranger.nongnu.org/. Has pretty good documentation
  • Available on Debian, Arch, Probably others, git and mailing list available as well.

screenshot

Features

  • 3-pane view:
    • Previous -> current -> next
    • When current is a file, uses file magic and other programs to preview the file
    • optional dependencies for previews:
      • img2txt from caca-utils for ASCII-art
      • highlight for syntax highlights
      • atool for archives
      • lynx/w3m/elinks for html
      • pdftotext for pdfs
      • transmission-show for bittorrent information
      • mediainfo or exiftool for mediafile info
    • Color coded, with three themes to choose from
    • One more over to the right opens the file from other programs

Configuration

  • located in ~/.config/ranger directory
  • rc.conf = keybindings and settings
  • commands.py = command-mode items
  • rifle.conf = file launcher options, which let you make custom file opener commands
  • scope.sh = custom file preview scripts, like mdview
  • up, down, left, right, or h,j,k,l
  • gg top G Bottom
  • E edit
  • pageup/down

Command commands

  • spacebar to mark or :mark for pattern
  • dd, yy, pp
  • :touch, :mkdir, :grep
  • del
  • rename and bulkrename (change from ranger.container.file import File to .fsobject.)
  • zh - toggle hidden
  • gn - new tab, gt or gT to navigate tabs
  • / search vile
  • V visual mode
  • :open_with
  • 1? = list key bindings
  • 2? list commands
  • 3? list settings
  • ? main help

Comments

Subscribe to the comments RSS feed.

Comment #1 posted on 2015-04-29 01:59:14 by Jon Kulp

Ranger is phenomenal

thanks for this rundown of Ranger! I've been using it for a couple of days and I'm blown away by the instant preview of every file. I've installed it on 3 machines where I only use ssh to work on em, so this is going to ease navigation on those considerably. Also love being able to use the familiar vim navigation and editing keystrokes yy and pp and so forth. Awesome!

Leave Comment

Note to Verbose Commenters
If you can't fit everything you want to say in the comment below then you really should record a response show instead.

Note to Spammers
All comments are moderated. All links are checked by humans. We strip out all html. Feel free to record a show about yourself, or your industry, or any other topic we may find interesting. We also check shows for spam :).

Provide feedback
Your Name/Handle:
Title:
Comment:
Anti Spam Question: What does the letter P in HPR stand for?
Are you a spammer?
What is the HOST_ID for the host of this show?
What does HPR mean to you?