FileCommand

A keyboard-driven, dual-panel file manager for the terminal, written in Rust (ratatui + crossterm). It recreates the Norton Commander 5.5 look and workflow — function-key command bar, pulldown menus, dual panels, built-in viewer/editor — with a small set of modern extras layered on top. Windows-first; cross-platform builds are best-effort.

Features

• Dual-panel navigation — Full/Brief/Tree panel modes, adjustable split, panel tabs, quick filter, type-ahead and fuzzy jump, viewport scrolling with a right-border scrollbar.
• File operations — copy/move/rename/delete with confirmation dialogs, multi-selection, clipboard file export to other Windows applications, Windows Explorer-style error handling.
• Command line & menus — an editable command line, pulldown menus, a drive selector, and an Enter-triggered file-action menu (run/view/edit/copy/move/rename/delete).
• Built-in viewer & editor, plus launching an external editor.
• Visual themes — terminal green, purple lights, yellow storm, and inverted, switchable live from the Options → Themes picker or the F2 user menu, or pinned at launch with --theme.
• Mouse support — click/drag panel focus and selection, resizable split.
• Responsive layout — degrades gracefully down to a 60×16 terminal.
• Git info, find-file, and a startup splash screen.

See openspec/specs/ for the authoritative, per-capability behavior specs, and docs/superpowers/specs/2026-08-06-filecommand-design.md for the full original design document.

Building from source

Requires the Rust toolchain (stable).

cargo build --release

The binary is produced at target\release\filecommand.exe. Run it directly, or via:

cargo run --release

Run the test suite (state/reducer logic in filecommand-core, rendering and snapshot tests in filecommand-tui):

cargo test --workspace

Installing

A Windows installer (FileCommandSetup.exe) packages filecommand.exe into a per-user (no elevation) or per-machine (elevated) install, adds itself to PATH, and is winget-deployable. See installer/README.md for build steps, scope semantics, and winget manifest details.

Command-line options

Flag	Effect
--theme <name> / --theme=<name>	Launch with a specific theme (terminal-green, purple-lights, yellow-storm, inverted), overriding the saved default for this session.
--nosplash	Skip the startup splash screen.
--nomouse	Disable mouse capture for this session (mouse support otherwise follows config.toml).

Project layout

• crates/filecommand-core — state and reducer logic, no UI dependencies.
• crates/filecommand-tui — rendering, input handling, and the filecommand binary.
• openspec/ — OpenSpec proposals and the per-capability specs that are the source of truth for current behavior.
• installer/ — the WiX (v4/v5) MSI + Burn bootstrapper packaging.

Contributing

This project develops behind an OpenSpec-driven, branch-per-change workflow — see CLAUDE.md for the exact rules (branch naming, what can land on main, and how proposals move from spec to implementation).

License

Dual-licensed under MIT or Apache-2.0, at your option.