Snappy, batteries-included terminal file manager with rich previews, inline images, bulk actions, and trash support.

• Three-pane layout — Places, Files, and Preview side by side
• Rich previews — text, code, documents, archives, media, and more; see Preview Coverage
• Inline images — rendered directly in supported terminals
• Customizable Places and devices — pinned folders plus auto-detected drives and mounts
• Quick actions — Go-to, Open With, and copy-to-clipboard
• Trash management — trash, restore, or permanently delete files
• Keyboard and mouse navigation — browse comfortably either way
• Grid and list views — switch with v, zoom the grid with + / -
• Fuzzy search — find folders and files quickly
• Theming — full palette and file-class control via theme.toml

Install from the AUR with your preferred AUR helper:

paru -S elio

Enable the COPR repository and install with dnf:

sudo dnf copr enable miguelregueiro/elio
sudo dnf install elio

Install from the Homebrew tap:

brew install elio-fm/elio/elio

Install from crates.io:

cargo install elio

elio starts in your current working directory.

cargo run --release

A few bundled themes are shown below. More are available in examples/themes/ — copy any theme.toml to your platform's theme path to apply it. See Theming for the paths and override rules.

Catppuccin Mocha	Tokyo Night

Amber Dusk	Blush Light

Inline visual previews, including images, covers, thumbnails, and rendered pages, work automatically on supported terminals.

Sixel terminals can render large or first-time previews more slowly than Kitty Graphics or iTerm2 Inline backends.

Useful environment variables:

elio works out of the box with no extra setup. Installing a few common utilities enables richer previews, metadata, thumbnails, and broader file format support. Only install what you need.

Inline image previews also require a compatible terminal. See Image Previews.

Enter enters folders and opens files with the system default application. o always opens the selected file or folder externally using the system launcher: open on macOS, cmd /c start on Windows, and xdg-open or gio on Linux and BSD desktop sessions.

O is for files. On macOS and Linux/BSD desktop sessions, elio discovers matching applications, opens the file directly when there is one match, and shows the Open With chooser when there are multiple. Terminal apps such as nvim are supported too. When no match is found, or on platforms without app discovery, elio falls back to the default opener.

c copies selected file names, paths, or directory paths using OSC52 on supported terminals, or falls back to platform clipboard tools:

• Wayland: wl-copy
• X11: xclip or xsel
• macOS: pbcopy
• Windows: clip

g opens a quick jump menu with shortcuts for the top of the current folder, Downloads, Home, the platform config folder, and Trash. The config destination is ~/.config or $XDG_CONFIG_HOME on Linux and BSD, ~/Library/Application Support on macOS, and %APPDATA% on Windows.

d moves the selected item or selection to the operating system trash. In the Trash view, d permanently deletes items and r restores them.

Trash uses the platform's native behavior where possible: Linux tries gio trash first, then falls back to the Freedesktop Trash layout; BSD uses Freedesktop Trash; macOS moves items to ~/.Trash and records restore metadata for items trashed by elio.

Windows can move items to the Recycle Bin through the platform trash backend, but elio does not expose the Recycle Bin as a browsable Trash view yet, so restore/permanent-delete-from-Trash workflows are not supported there.

On Freedesktop Trash systems, the stored filename may be changed to avoid collisions, for example photo.jpg.2. elio reads the matching .trashinfo metadata, so the file is still shown, previewed, opened, and restored as the original photo.jpg.

f searches folders and Ctrl+F searches files in the current directory tree. Search follows the hidden-file setting, skips symlinks, prunes common generated folders such as .git, node_modules, and target, and refreshes when the directory changes. Very large trees are capped so search stays responsive.

elio can preview a broad range of content in the Preview pane, including text, structured data, document details, archive contents, and media metadata with covers or thumbnails when available.

• Text and code — plain text, source code with syntax highlighting, and Markdown
• Structured data — JSON, JSONC, JSON5, YAML, TOML, .env, logs, CSV/TSV, and SQLite
• Documents — PDF, EPUB, MOBI, AZW3, DOC, DOCX, DOCM, ODT, Pages, XLSX, XLSM, ODS, PPTX, PPTM, and ODP
• Media — image metadata and inline previews, audio metadata and covers, and video metadata and thumbnails
• Folders and archives — directories, ZIP/TAR/RAR/7z archives, CBZ/CBR comic archives, torrents, ISO images, and other disk-image-style containers
• Binary files — metadata previews for non-text files

See Optional Preview Tools for helpers that unlock richer metadata, thumbnails, and rendered previews.

See examples/config.toml for a complete annotated example.

Supported sections:

• [ui]: startup UI options like top bar, hidden files, and initial grid view
• [places]: pinned sidebar entries and the Devices section
• [layout.panes]: relative pane weights for Places, Files, and Preview
• [keys]: single-character key rebinding for browser actions

Notes:

• Omit [places] to keep the default sidebar.
• Omit [layout.panes] to use the built-in responsive layout.
• If [layout.panes] is set, all three pane weights must be provided.
• places = 0 hides the Places pane, and preview = 0 hides the Preview pane.
• files must be greater than 0.
• Pane weights are relative, so 10/45/45 and 20/90/90 produce the same split.
• In narrow terminals where Preview stacks below Files, files and preview control the vertical split.
• places.entries accepts built-in names, { builtin, icon? }, or { title, path, icon? }.
• Custom places paths must be absolute or start with ~/.
• Invalid places entries are skipped with a warning.
• Invalid or conflicting key bindings fall back to defaults with a warning.
• Invalid TOML falls back to the built-in defaults.

Theme files layer on top of the built-in defaults, so you only need to set the keys you want to change.

Supported sections:

• [palette]: app-wide colors
• [preview.code]: syntax highlight colors for code previews
• [classes.<name>]: default icon and color for a file class
• [extensions.<ext>]: overrides by file extension
• [files."<name>"]: overrides by exact filename
• [directories."<name>"]: overrides by exact directory name

Rules:

• Exact filename or directory rules win over extension rules.
• Extension rules win over class defaults.
• Matching is case-insensitive.
• Invalid theme files fall back to the built-in defaults, with errors reported to stderr.

Built-in file classes: directory · code · config · document · license · image · audio · video · archive · font · data · file

See assets/themes/default/theme.toml for the full default theme.

MIT