 If you've watched the channel for any amount of time, you know that my favorite Linux application is an application called Crusader and Crusader is a file manager and it has a ton of features and a lot of dependencies and it is amazing but it's not for everybody. I can freely admit that not everyone needs the power that Crusader offers and that's okay that's why there are other file managers out there. For a lot of people who watch this channel, a terminal file manager is actually perfectly fine but if you aren't one of those people and you're kind of wondering why should I use a file manager in the terminal, well that's what this video is about. Today I'm going to be talking about the top five reasons you should use a terminal file manager. So this is pretty much universal across all the terminal file managers that I've ever tried, obviously some features are going to be hit or miss depending on which one you're using but for the most part you're going to have access to most of the features that I talk about today. So the first reason why you should use a terminal file manager is because it's keyboard centric. Now this is not going to appeal to everyone but for those of you who are in a tiling window manager or perhaps you use a desktop environment but you use it with a bunch of keyboard shortcuts being able to navigate your file manager with nothing but the keyboard is amazing and it is very efficient so with this one here where this is Ranger I can navigate with the VIM keys, I can enter command mode just like you would in VIM and there's just a ton of different things that you can do all of it focused right with the keyboard. In fact you'll never need to use the mouse unless you absolutely want to and that's great. Now obviously there are some downsides to this being keyboard centric, drag and drop is not here unless you've set up one of the hacks that actually make it work but out of the box there's no drag and drops but that's really the only downside to using a terminal file manager that is solely keyboard focused. Obviously this also means you can create bookmarks and things like that that allow you to easily navigate through your file system with keyboard shortcuts. So for example right now I'm in the slash OPT directory if I wanted to go home I could hit GH and that would take me to my home directory and I've set up several different key bindings like that that take me to my external hard drives and my internal hard drives things like that and that makes it so much easier than having to navigate all the way out here go down to OPT do this thing and then go all the way back up here go to home and then back in here just pressing two keys is way quicker than press pressing a whole bunch of other keys and that kind of leads me into the second reason why you should use a terminal file manager and that is it's customizable so if I quit out of Ranger here and go into the Ranger configuration file all of the configuration is done in this file here and it's basically the same for any terminal file manager that you use they all have configuration files of some sort most of them anyways and you can do just a ton of stuff in here you can change how the file manager looks you can change how the file manager reacts to certain things maybe you can change whether or not it has multi-pane or not multi-pane whether or not it has tabs how you get around to different tabs what key bindings are default and much much more the sky really is the limit when it comes to how you configure these things and when you compare that to a GUI file manager like Nautilus or Thunar or whatever the main ones there while they do have customization options they're not nearly as customizable as something you could do in a configuration file now the next reason why you should use a terminal file manager is that it's low on resources so when I talk about research I'm not necessarily talking about like CPU and memory and stuff like that although I'm sure when you compare Ranger to something like Crusader or Nautilus or something like that you would see that the terminal file manager is way less in terms of resources when really talking about is dependencies so if you were to download Ranger it's going to download some dependencies probably more than the average terminal file manager because it's written in Python but if you compare it to a graphical file manager it's going to have still less dependencies than any of those that I can think of and if you look at some of the more minimalistic file managers you can see that those are just basically shell scripts in some cases and have no dependencies whatsoever if you compare that situation to a GUI file manager specifically things like Crusader or Dolphin or whatever you can really see the difference between how many dependencies one takes over the other and while it really doesn't matter for most people it's still something that you can kind of keep in mind if you're interested in that kind of minimalistic software usage a terminal file manager is more likely to be minimal than a GUI file manager the next one on the list is easy access to terminal commands now almost every terminal file manager has something like this and basically what it does is it allows you to interact with the files on your system just like you would if you were in a shell environment so for example if I go to my home director here and then go into media and then my wallpapers folder let's just say I wanted to select multiple files which I can do with the spacebar and then let's just say I wanted to move them somewhere else I could hit dd and then go into the next folder and then paste them just like that with a p twice and it would paste them just like that basically what that's actually doing is deleting those files yanking them into a register and then pasting them so those are things that you'd expect to have like invent right but there are other things that you can do as well so let me reselect all these things here and let's just say that I wanted to bulk rename them so I could do that in Ranger by hitting the colon you can see this down here at the bottom here just so and hit bulk rename and that would allow me to get into them I could change the first character of all these to like V or something like so you know and whatever I wanted to do and then I'd save this it asked me if I wanted to confirm and now all of the ones that I changed whoops I'm navigated the wrong direction I have the V infirm so I could do a bulk rename it and that is a command that Ranger has built in a lot of terminal file managers have something like that in addition there are also things like CD that work here CP move make directory so if I wanted to make a directory I could hit F7 and that would basically just MK dir in this current directory and I could type in this is a folder like so and now I have a directory called this is a folder it's it's really as simple as that it's quite cool the final reason why terminal file managers are really awesome is that you can integrate external applications right into them so for example you could have a script that added tags to music let's just say you had that right and you're in your music folder you could then assign a key binding to that script that would then run on any selected folders and files and then the script would run you could do whatever the script does and it would retag those things right and that's just one example I have a application called fanfic ferrets for online stories and such like that and it will allow me to download things directly from the file manager into whatever folder I'm in same thing with youtube dl same thing with any other terminal application you can assign a key binding to work right inside the file manager and it will interact with the selected files that you have here now obviously that's going to require some tweaking and stuff like that inside the configuration file in order to get to work but it's not something you can really do with a gooey file manager unless developers have built that integration into the application itself this allows you to do it instead of having to have a developer do it for you and obviously those things that I mentioned are just a few examples of what could possibly be done the sky really is the limit any terminal application that you can run in the terminal can interact with files inside of your file manager at least things like ranger allow you to do that and that is quite awesome so those are just a few of the reasons why I think that everyone should at least be familiar with the terminal file manager I don't think that like I said it's going to be for everyone a lot of people require some of the things that gooey's just do better so things like drag and drop are almost always going to be superior in a gooey file manager that's just always going to be the case even if you could hack together a solution for a terminal file manager to do drag and drop it's still not going to be as eloquent or as useful as it is in a gooey that's just going to be kind of the case but outside of the drag and drop thing there really isn't much that a terminal file manager can't do that a gooey can and they actually do have some advantages over gooey file managers also one thing that I didn't really mention is that a lot of file managers you can't run those things as sudo or grant them root privileges you can do that with things like ranger or lf or whatever you just run the command as sudo give it your password and then you have root access now I don't recommend you do that unless you absolutely know what you're doing but it can be done add on top of that things like bulk rename bulk file creation things like that it really does make terminal file managers really useful and there are several of them out there so if you want to try one I recommend starting out with ranger ranger is the easiest one at least in my opinion it works and it's in most of the repose so you won't have to build it yourself and it has a very user readable configuration files there are other ones of course you can try things like vifm lf nnn midnight commander is one which is really old but still works really well so there are plenty of options and this might open up an area for you to explore and have a little bit of fun and so in the comment section below let me know what's your favorite terminal file manager is if you use one if you don't use one tell me why not you can follow me on twitter at the linuxcast you can follow me on mastodon or odyssey those links will be in the video description just below the like button if you would hit that like button it would really help the channel out you can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash the linuxcast just like all these fine people thanks to everybody who does support me on patreon youtube you guys are all amazing and i'm so appreciative of your support without you the channel would just not be what it is today i swear to god so thanks for your support thanks everybody for watching i'll see you next time