u

A minimal, colorful and sleek terminal file manager for macOS.

 u — keybindings

╭──────────────────────────────────────────────────────╮
│  NAVIGATION              SELECTION                   │
│  j / ↓   move down       space   toggle mark         │
│  k / ↑   move up         x       cut selection       │
│  h / ←   parent dir      y       copy selection      │
│  l / →   open             p       paste here         │
╰──────────────────────────────────────────────────────╯

Features

• Vim-like navigation — j/k/h/l, arrow keys, g/G to jump top/bottom
• Split-pane preview — see the contents of text files, source code, and directories without opening them
• Archive peeking — look inside .zip and .tar.gz/.tgz files without extracting
• Cut / copy / paste — move or duplicate files and folders, with smart name-collision handling
• Multi-select — mark several files at once for bulk delete/cut/copy
• Git-aware — folders containing a .git directory are highlighted in purple
• Language-aware colors — .py, .js, .rb, .c/.cpp, .rs files get distinct colors at a glance
• In-app help — press u or ? anytime for a full keybinding reference

Requirements

• macOS (Ruby ships preinstalled)
• A terminal emulator that supports ANSI escape codes (Terminal.app, iTerm2, etc...)

Ruby is not preinstalled by default on most Linux distributions — if you're on Linux, install it first (e.g. sudo apt install ruby / sudo dnf install ruby). I didn't develop u to be compatible with Linux.

Installation

Quick install (recommended):

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ufuayk/u/macos/install.sh | bash

This downloads u.rb and installs it on your PATH as u (falls back to ~/.local/bin if you don't have write access to /usr/local/bin or sudo).

Manual install (not recommended):

chmod +x u.rb
sudo mv u.rb /usr/local/bin/u

Either way, run u from anywhere once it's installed.

Usage

u                          # opens in your home directory (default)
u /path/to/somewhere       # opens in a specific directory
u --start /path/to/dir     # same as above, explicit flag form
u --width 100 --height 30  # override the forced terminal size (default 120x40)
u --no-resize              # don't force-resize the terminal at all
u --help                   # print CLI usage and exit

By default, u asks your terminal to resize itself to 120×40 on launch — that's the size it's tuned for. Most modern terminal emulators honor this automatically; if yours doesn't, the layout still adapts gracefully to whatever size you have.

Keybindings

Key	Action
j / ↓	Move down
k / ↑	Move up
h / ←	Go to parent directory
l / → / Enter	Open directory, open file, or peek inside an archive
g	Jump to top
G	Jump to bottom
space	Toggle mark on the current entry
x	Cut (marked entries, or current)
y	Copy / yank (marked entries, or current)
p	Paste into the current directory
d	Delete (marked entries, or current) — asks to confirm
r	Rename current entry
n	Create a new file
N	Create a new directory
.	Toggle hidden files
/	Filter entries by text
R	Refresh the listing
v	Toggle the preview pane
u / ?	Toggle the in-app help screen
q / Ctrl-C	Quit

Press u or ? inside the app anytime — the full reference above is always one keypress away.

Preview pane

Toggle it with v. It shows, on the right half of the screen:

• Text & source files (.txt, .md, .py, .js, .rb, .sh, .c, and more) — the actual file contents, read-only. Nothing is ever executed.
• Directories — a quick listing of what's inside.
• .zip / .tar.gz / .tgz archives — the list of files inside the archive, with sizes, without extracting anything to disk.

Cut, copy, paste

• y copies the current (or marked) entries to an in-memory clipboard. It persists — paste it into as many places as you like.
• x cuts them instead. Cut is one-shot: it clears itself after a single paste (a move).
• p pastes into whatever directory you're currently browsing.
• Pasting into a directory that already has a file with the same name won't overwrite it — u automatically names the copy file copy.ext, file copy 2.ext, and so on, the same way Finder does.

Design notes

• Everything is implemented with Ruby's standard library only — io/console, fileutils, zlib. No rubyzip, no third-party gems, no network calls.
• The .zip reader parses the ZIP central directory by hand; the .tar.gz reader parses USTAR headers over a Zlib::GzipReader stream. Both only list archive contents — extraction isn't implemented (yet).
• The whole file manager lives in a single executable script, so installing it is just copying one file onto your PATH.

License

MIT. Not the university. xd