 I have a serious fascination with file managers and you know this if you've watched my channel for any amount of time I've made a ton of videos about file managers more than one of them has been about Crusader and I have at least two more of those planned I have a problem I like file managers and abnormal amount I don't know why I can't really even explain it to myself let alone anybody else but I like file managers so every once in a while I get the hankering to try something new now via FM has been around for a very long time so it's not exactly new but I've never actually used it before so I thought it was about time so today we're gonna be taking a look at via FM VI FM and as the name suggests it has a very Vim like or Vi like structure that allows you to navigate through it using the I'm gonna call them the Vim key bindings even though we know it came before that but you understand the purpose right the idea here is that you can navigate in the file manager using the Vim key bindings or in this you know the Vi key bindings whatever you want to say and it's very simple file manager but it's deceptively simple and I'll talk about that as we go through so let me actually show you what VI FM looks like right now so this is VI FM and as you can see it's not like basically any other terminal file manager outside of midnight commanders so there aren't very many dual pane terminal file managers out there most of them are single pane and usually for good reason because dual pane file managers are really specifically good for dragging and dropping between the two panes right that's usually why two pane is useful but at least that's what I always thought right when I first saw that this was dual pane I was like what's the purpose here what what benefit could you possibly have because dragging and dropping is not something that you can do in a terminal at least not easily I mean there are tools that you can do so but they're finicky at best so what's the purpose of a dual pane file manager in the terminal when you can't drag and drop well just because you can't drag and drop doesn't mean you can't copy and paste so that's where my misconception was because it's very easy to have two different directories open so let's just say we have my pictures directory open here we'll go to my wallpapers and other walls and this one here and then if I want to go to the other pane I get tab and navigate to say my downloads folder and I could copy things from one place to another so I have to do is say go down here to let's go back here let's just say I wanted wanted to take this one here I could do DD and it would ask me if I want to lead I'm just technically deleting it you could yank it if you wanted to leave it there and yank would be the equivalent of copy instead of cutting so then I go back to the other pane hit P and now that thing that I cut is now in the other directory and the idea here is that you can have two directories open at the same time and move files between them just like you would if you were to drag and drop in a say a terminal file manager like you know crusader which I have right here like so and I could drag something from here over here and that's the way you would do it in a GUI file manager so that's via FM what it looks like so let's talk a little bit about navigation so when it comes to navigation if you've learned the VIM keybindings you've learned the via FM keybindings for the most part so up and down is J and K and then if you were to wanted to go into say this particular directory you to L that take you in H would take you back out so that basically that's left and right in is left out is right and you get the idea if you want to go to the top GG goes to the top capital G goes to the bottom and those are the basic them keybindings that you've probably used if you've ever used them for you can also do many things just like you would in the command line so you can do colon which is entering command mode and do basically anything you want to do there so you can execute commands you can open files do basically anything you could do inside of them inside of the command or inside of the FM and it just works so the basic idea here is that it's as VIM like or by like as possible and that's good if you you're a big them user because you don't have to learn a ton of new keybindings so let me show you some of the other keybindings that are here so this is the man page for via FM and the basic movements as you can see are just the VIM movements so KJ H and L are for moving as I showed you GG and GGH is to go up one directory regardless of the view GL or enter will enter a directory or launch the file capital H will move to the first file in the window so if I go over here and hit capital H it'll actually go to the top there capital M will go to the file in the middle of the window so they'll go to the middle file now one thing that I'm not quite sure how it works or why it works this way is the spacebar so if you see here it says space is used to switch between file lists so as I showed you earlier tab is actually what does that if I can make sure the right thing is is on focus tab moves between these but when you use space space leaves this little odd notation here and I'm not sure what that actually does because it's not actually something that it says basically what it says here is just that it moves between file lists it's not yanking it as far as I'm aware because the little bit register is empty so I'm not sure what the notation there is I'm thinking it's just that it's noting where the cursor was when you switched because it looks like it does the same thing with tabs so when you yeah that's exactly what it's doing now that I see it the it's showing you just where the cursor was when you left that particular pain that makes sense the reason why that was confusing is because in like Ranger if I show you Ranger here of course I don't have Ranger installed if you see can see Ranger here if I were to hit the spacebar that's actually going to select those things and in certain places where you don't have a theme for it it'll actually leave a asterisk next to it so that's how I was confused because sometimes the asterisk means that it's selected and a lot of file managers the asterisk means selected that's reason why I got confused to that but really all the space and space and tab here are exactly the same thing so just like with them you can actually move down certain percentage counts or regular counts so if I wanted to go down 10 lines I could do 10 J and that moved down 10 files or if I wanted to do it go up I go 10 K and that go up 10 files you can do the same thing with percentage or you can use the G and GG ones with account to go up or to center the list position at the count you can also redraw the pains using ZT ZZ and ZB now so basically what you're looking at here is a split so if you've ever used them before you'll know that them has a great way of splitting files or splitting the pain so that you can view multiple documents side by side that's basically what this is and just like in them you can manipulate these splits in any way you want so for example you can do control W capital J and it will move the splits so they're on top and bottom and if you wanted to go back you could do control W L and it would move them back side by side and that's capital H and capital J not small the control W H and J in the small sense just moves the cursor back and forth which is the similar is similar to what you'd see with the spacebar in the tab key so if you want to manipulate these so that even that if they're different sizes you can do so just like that so like I said there are many different ways you can manipulate the splits or the different pains and that means you can basically make your VIFM look however you want if you prefer the pains to be top and bottom you can do so so if you wanted to say for example have the pains to be different size you could do control W and then plus and control W plus again 10 plus we'll actually move it 10 spots over so just like you can move down 10 lines if you wanted to move your pain over 10 spots you could do control W 10 and then plus and then if you wanted to move that back you could do control W 10 and then minus and that made it look really really weird but we'll try again to save that troll W and then 10 plus there we go and we'll do it again control W 10 plus and that kind of gets us back to where we started so as you can see the key bindings are a little wonky but then again them key bindings can be a little wonky that's one of the reasons why manipulating splits is one of the things that I change in all of my VIM RC files so that they're a little bit more sane you don't have to deal with the kind of funky key cords that they have by default so those are the basic key bindings there are tons more obviously that you can navigate through if you look at the man page and I'm not gonna go through all of them but they are all well documented so you can peruse through them as you learn and it's just very easy and obviously if you know VIM key bindings if you know VIM movements all that stuff is here and it works really well and obviously if you get to a point where you have started a key binding and it you know you don't know the second part of it is let's just say hit Q it'll actually show you all the stuff that can come next so that means that if it's kind of like a helper tool so if you need to if you've forgotten a key binding it will help you as long as you remembered a certain portion of the key bindings so that's really nice you can get rid of that by hitting escape so those are the key bindings and the movements and like I said if you've learned them at all you'll be very comfortable here but what happens if you want to configure via them well you can obviously do that really easy by going to the via FM RC now this is created the first time you open via them by default so you don't have to worry about creating it yourself or moving it from some root directory it's here created by default and it has all of the same defaults and if you've ever configured VIM before you pretty much know everything you need to know about how to navigate through this file so you can create functions and things like that just like you can see here you can use if statements if you want you can set particular variables just using the set command you can use the let command the let built in as well inside of if statements and variables you can set the trash directory and you can set the history if you want so there are a ton of different things that you can do inside of the configuration file and I could spend a good hour going through this there's 538 lines or so in the default configuration file but basically if you've ever configured VIM before you will know that a lot of stuff here so you can see where it sets certain key bindings and obviously because this is a configuration file as long as you know what you're doing you can build your own key binding set and do certain things inside of your file manager that you won't be able to do by default so say for example if you wanted to have a key binding to CD into a certain directory you could do that if you wanted to set a key binding to automatically copy a certain amount of files to the register you could do that the sky is really the limit as long as you know VIM script and it's all here and it's well documented as well so as long as you basically know what you're doing inside of VIM you know what you're doing inside of MRC I will also link to a video by the Linux tabbler he has a video that goes in depth over his VIF MRC file and that video is awesome it's like 40 minutes long and he just talks a whole bunch about what he has in his file and that will help you understand the infinite possibilities when it comes to configuration of IFM I apologize I'm losing my voice which is just utter fantastic anyways I will link to that video in the video description below because that video is awesome you should definitely give the Linux tabbler a subscribe because all of his videos are great okay so that's the configuration file like I said I could go through more of this stuff but if you've ever seen the MRC file this is basically the same thing just for a file manager has several if then statements or if if else statements it has a whole bunch of key bindings here to show you the way it's done and by defaults so they have bindings here for fast remapping or renaming I should say they have bindings here for for executing files in GVM if you use GVM a lot of the stuff could be taken out if you wanted to if you don't use GVM as well so you can make this file simpler if you wanted to you can also use a key binding here to start a shell to get into the shell command prompt if you wanted to so there's a ton of stuff in here by default and because they have some key bindings in here you can use this as a like a template for creating your own key bindings as well so that's the configuration file now there are two other things that I want to talk about so the first one is image preview VFM does have image preview I could not get it to work inside of Tilex here but apparently if you use kitty you can get it to work using iCat I think is what it was called I have a document here or a blog post here telling you how to do it I will link to this in the video description as well it did not work for me because I don't use kitty so I don't know how well or good it is but apparently it can be done in addition there is apparently ways of adding icons to VFM I didn't do a lot of research into how to do this because I just actually just thought about it just now but apparently can be done there is a plugin or something that I found here that'll apparently do it for you I'm not sure again how well it is because it looks well maybe it's not abandoned it was just updated six months ago so maybe that will work but there are also other ways of doing it so if you want to do that I will also link to these in the video description as well so just because it's based on VFM doesn't mean that it's not as fully featured as you'd expect in fact I'd say it's more fully featured that as any other terminal file manager maybe even more so so because of the dual-pay nature you have more flexibility over what things or how things look and how things function and it gives you the ability to see where you're taking files from one place to another instead of having to actually move out of the directory to copy and paste things like you would with range or whatever so I really like via them though the thing is is that I'm very much a ranger user like I said at the beginning I've used ranger for three or four years now it's been my full-time file manager I've tried many other ones but I've always come back to ranger because it's the one that I'm most comfortable with but I do think that I'm going to spend some time with via them customize it to the point where it looks nice and follows my themes and stuff like that and then see if it'll actually be able to replace ranger for me because like I showed you before I didn't even have ranger installed yet I just hopped to you know fedora again or read you know reinstalled for girl I should say and hadn't even installed ranger yet so I think via FM is worthwhile to give a try if especially if you are a vim user and I am a vim user I are one as they say so I'm gonna give it a good go and see how well it works and I think that because it's so customizable I think I'll be happy with it in the end so that is via FM if you have thoughts on on that you can leave it in the comment section below I'd love to hear from you you can follow me on mastodon or odyssey those links be in the video description you can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash the limits cast links for liberapay and youtube will be in 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