How to Set Up and Configure LF (The Best Terminal File Manager)

Tired of clicking endlessly just to get to the files you need? Ready to improve your workflow with a million keybindings to navigate your filesystem fast? Ditch your slow, uncool graphical file manager and learn how to use the lf file explorer. I'll go over how to set it up, configure it, add icons, image previews and more. Afraid it's too much work to actually learn how to use? Learn everything you need to know in just 16 minutes and never leave the home row of your keyboard again...
My lfrc: github.com/ericmurphyxyz/arch...
lf GitHub: github.com/gokcehan/lf
lf icons: github.com/gokcehan/lf/wiki/I...
lf-ueberzug: github.com/slavistan/lf-gadge...
My website: ericmurphy.xyz
0:00 Why use a terminal file manager?
1:01 Why use lf?
1:24 Installation
1:38 Basic usage
4:46 Configuration
10:48 Icons
12:41 Media previews
15:30 Conclusion

[@mateusgomes1086]

Thank you! You helped me a lot to better understand how to use lf and how to get image previews with ueberzug! I hope you're doing well and that your channel grows much more!

[@markring40]

Thank you Eric! I’ve been looking for this information for a few weeks. This video was perfect 👍

[@EricMurphyxyz]

Awesome, glad you found it useful!

[@ZakariaHABRI]

You can put the two lines in lfrc-ueberzug in your lfrc, it works the same with less files! Thanks a lot for all the awesome videos, I'm loving my system more with every modification.

[@akshdeepsingh2107]

Thanks, this actually worked for me because system was treating lf and lf-ueberzug as two different programs and my customization done on lf was not showing in lf-ueberzug.

[@Lobaluna9333]

Thank you! A big hug! Thanks for all your great educational videos!

[@a9nh]

Thanks a lot! You helped me getting started on lf!

[@nomadtrails]

SOLD, looks absolutely awesome

[@CyperN077]

Very good video. It helped me out! Thnx...

[@miracleweb8461]

Thank you again for the amazing video! Also I'm now learning VIM first time, because of your channel, lol) Can you make a video, how to setup i3wm (or what tiling manager do you use)?

[@EricMurphyxyz]

Thanks! Vim will change your life, haha. I may create a basic setup guide for bspwm, that's a good idea

[@MoreChannelNoise]

Cant decide between this and Cfiles, both are so good

[@code9078]

Thank you for sharing!

[@liyuefu]

great Help. Thanks

[@danieldiaz2093]

Great! very clear and very good configuration. Can you compress files?

[@abdoulayebalde2139]

Hey thanks for the video. Actually I need your help. I install LF and customize it the way I want but for example if i wanna play music or video when I click on it it's showing " Running shell exit status 127" what should I do? I am using MPV for both music and video.

[@Little-bird-told-me]

Nice choice of atire :)

[@EricMurphyxyz]

Had to show off my gains in this video

[@Little-bird-told-me]

@@EricMurphyxyz Indeed! btw Got ref from Matt's video. thanks for sharing your dotfiles and showing the bash scripts in config. Have always loved your content especially the Alacritty ones

[@kidamanecer2144]

Hi Eric! I got a question. Is it plausible to use it when dealing with downloads and file uploads with firefox or any other browser? When i have to upload a file to any site, it usually pulls up my default file manager (i'm currently running a openSUSE machine w/ KDE Plasma) When I try to move from KDE to something more minimal, let's say i3 or bspwm, I'm forced to use whichever file manager Firefox is feeling like to pick. That's inconvenient, and to be fair Dolphin is great because it gives you the opportunity to filter, see previews, etc. Whereas the other graphical file managers are awful to work with. However, if I can make Firefox to work with LF (or at least Ranger) I'll do the full change, since that's the only feature holding me back. Thanks for your content!

[@EricMurphyxyz]

Thanks! As far as I know there is no way to do that, I just have to deal with using a GUI file browser inside other GUI programs.

[@Echoes_of_Albatross]

Thanks, It helps, what I was looking for.

[@jacobtb1]

awesome thanks

[@ironmanlifts]

New to LF. What are the tags for ? I presume to manipulate the tags fine with a custom command? In nvim tags allow you to jump to files. In LF I presume you create your own custom command with the file it creates.

[@Mantikal]

Great video. I like the look, feel and speed of this file manager. If you have an audio, video or text file - how do you open them with your preferred apps or how would you change your preferred apps to run those files - using this file manager? Also, how would one go about having a transparent back ground?

[@EricMurphyxyz]

Thanks! All the files are opened with the default application for those file types. If you're using a window manager, it follows the XDG specification, so you can edit your mimeapps.list file. See the Arch wiki for more info: wiki.archlinux.org/title/XDG_MIME_Applications For transparent backgrounds, I use picom to achieve these effects. I have a video on it here: kzbin.info/www/bejne/qmeunZpteNuIrqM

[@Mantikal]

@@EricMurphyxyz Thanks

[@user-ru4iu4mv2l]

Thank You!!! I love your video with LF . How to set the colors ? Could you share the code ? thank you

[@cmespy2005]

Iam a little lost on the installation part of this program. However great job explaining it usage

[@michaelkashkov4337]

Amazing! ) Thanks Eric ) Basically Ranger for Linux / Mac == LF for Win

[@EricMurphyxyz]

Glad you like it, but lf works just as well on mac and linux

[@michaelkashkov4337]

@@EricMurphyxyz yep ) I tested it on mac as well. It comes out of the box less powerful than Ranger (deletion, renaming, and so on), but it can be solved with extensive customization. I hope Devs will find a way to add it by default in future iterations. I like that It has been written in Go =)

[@gg-gn3re]

lf is in Go and copies ranger entirely because python is a nightmare. These both are linux softwares that work on anything you can slap a shell into also cut copy and paste... d, y and p... maybe you should read the stuff a bit before posting, everything you say is wrong

[@RogueRen]

Maybe I'm doing something wrong but a bunch of the later stuff in the video doesn't work for me (Pop!_OS 21.10 w/ KDE Plasma). Previews just don't work in the terminal at all even after installing all the prerequisites, I just get text saying "binary" of stuff that isn't a directory or text file, and the link you have to the icons is just gone.

[@alyson3919]

His instructions are deprecated. Please follow the instructions in the GitHub repo.

[@DavidRobertLewis]

Seems one has to have zsh installed for any of the add-on gadgets to work?

[@user-fz1ps4xk8u]

I assume there is a way to have a dual pane display like Ranger ala Midnight Commander?

[@glidersuzuki5572]

Lf is good. But I'm just love Vifm. It has a easy to setup preview. It also has a dual pane.

[@EricMurphyxyz]

I've tried both, but I still like lf a bit more. I wasn't a big fan of the dual pane, but I can see how some might like it

[@gizmotruveauth20]

can you please explain how to make all the gadgets work together within one lf session?

[@akshitthakur5179]

I am getting an error. lstat $PATH: no such file or directory. Help please!!

[@saadahmed688]

yazi just works

[@daleholden]

Hi Eric and chance or thought on doing a video on .zshenv, .zshrc, .zlogin, .zprofile, .zlogout how to use them when to use and when not to use them?

[@AindriuMacGiollaEoin]

powerful

[@subhajitmishra007]

Awesome!!! Thank you! Btw, what's your color scheme for the terminal? Also the font please.....

[@EricMurphyxyz]

Tokyo Night and JetBrains Mono

[@nidhishshivashankar4885]

james burnham and julius evola 👀 nice

[@EricMurphyxyz]

Based

[@Miinui0]

How do you change default app when opening a file

[@MacroAcc]

hi, 2 years later but i have a question. why yould you use LF over ranger? LF seems like a downgrade. call me a normie but i like to use mouse to click on stuff (needs only one hand and is fast)

[@ThePlacehole]

The greatest file manager? Without undo it's not even in the top 10!

[@alonn6]

Hey Eric! you know if there's chance for installing this for centos linux? i dont see on the package list :-(

[@EricMurphyxyz]

If it's not in the package repos, just build it from source. There's instructions on how to do so on the GitHub.

[@VladPalacios]

Can it render PDF files? How great would it be an integration with Zathura

[@daleholden]

Hi Eric i notice ueberzug is no longer maintained so not sure it would be safe to use moving forward. Do you know any better solutions ? Also the Icon list has been removed from lf site. Its ok i got a list from your zshenv file :)

[@EricMurphyxyz]

For the moment, I'm still using ueberzug and it's still working. I do probably need to find a replacement though, I may do a future video on that.

[@EricMurphyxyz]

If you're interested in some replacements for ueberzug, you can see some alternate solutions here: github.com/gokcehan/lf/wiki/Previews

[@daleholden]

@@EricMurphyxyz hi the instructions have changed Prerequisites/:- 1.zsh for scripting 2. ueberzug for all graphical previews 3. graphicsmagick for svg and gif previews 4. ffmpeg for video file thumbnails 5. gs for PDF previews For shell integration symlink lf-ueberzug into /usr/local/bin and alias lf=lf-ueberzug in your shell configuration. This can be combined with the functionality of lf-shellcd, which is part of this directory, to change your working directory upon exiting. Can i ask when it says Prerequisites i tried to install 2 - 5 but i could not find a install for number 2 ueberzug. So i take it you mean just clone from github or is there an actual install? Also this mentions symlinks and aliasas but not mentioned in the video do i need to create what it says ?

[@charliekim2939]

I think I have tried most (if not all, including my own) file managers but I have never been totally happy with any. But, this 'lf' thingy looks promising. I should give it a try. Will I be happy? Or, will I be disappointed - again? In the latter case, I can go back to 'fr' (filerunner, an old program written in tcl/tk.) It has been one of my can't-live-without programs for a few decades now. Although far from ideal, it is still the only file manager I am reasonably happy with. Other essentials include nedit, python2, tgif, etc. all of which seem going extinct - like myself. (Sigh!)

[@heroe1486]

I don't really understand the use case for terminal file managers outside of getting an easy way for previewing images, if I'm in the terminal it's way faster to move with ls cd + tools like fzf and zoxide, same for copying/pasting etc. If I use a file manager, which is rare, it's usually for GUI functionalities like draging and droping into the browser.

[@quintit]

You don't even need a fm for that, if u set your browser to ask where to download, you can drag and drop from that built in file manager.

[@arijitgogoi5653]

Right here

[@folksurvival]

?

[@anakinhamilton978]

Is there anyway to do this in bash?

[@ekkymahesa8708]

What's the difference between this and ranger?

[@EricMurphyxyz]

They're pretty similar, but lf is a bit faster and less resource-intensive. Also lf is configured with shell commands instead of Python, which can be nice if you're like me and have more experience writing shell script than you do with Python.

[@maciejkowalski6045]

so thats why i cant delete anything or run i need to bind something

[@xyicoc]

how to use it like file manager with tcsh, not like ls

[@user-si3nr8dj5p]

how to show binary in lf file manger

[@felipemiotto1549]

Is the icon function unavailable now? Looked everywhere for this icons folder on the official GitHub repository, but it seems to be gone. Tried doing by myself too, with the icons I've found on reddit, but yet it did not work.

[@EricMurphyxyz]

Not sure why it's gone from the GitHub, but you can find them in my .zshenv in my dotfiles on GitHub, link in the description

[@felipemiotto1549]

@@EricMurphyxyz Thanks! Worked fine now

[@VictoriaMan69]

@@EricMurphyxyz just checked your dotfiles and couldn't find your .zshenv

[@EricMurphyxyz]

@@VictoriaMan69 github.com/ericmurphyxyz/archrice/blob/master/.zshenv

[@VictoriaMan69]

@@EricMurphyxyz thanks buddy! subbed, see you next vid.

[@GoatzombieBubba]

LF github page does not have a dedicated icons link anymore.

[@Bobby-vs3zc]

Brother, what you did then?

[@user-gp8ub8vh7i]

Because it is not needed anymore, just a Nerd Font installed.

[@CyperN077]

Can you do a bulk rename like ranger?

[@EricMurphyxyz]

You would have to write/find a script to do something like that, there's no built-in feature to bulk rename

[@DzintarsDev]

You are absolutely wrong! The greatest file manager is vifm! Let's end this there! :)

[@jobaizen4892]

hi, unarchive not working

[@piushpaul4880]

damm ueberzug github repo is unvailable and on top of that I am windows user :(

[@pewolo]

You can actually delete files in LF by typing :delete

[@roman_mishin]

lf does not show (and does not have an option to show) timestamps in file listing using the ISO 8601 time format (like 2022-01-21 15:09:35). I can not tolerate its use because of that fact alone.

[@gg-gn3re]

all you do is go into the config and do ```set timefmt '2006-01-02 15:04:05' ``` dummy

[@roman_mishin]

@@gg-gn3re I have that option set. I do mean "file listing" (set info time), not "file status" (set timefmt ...).

[@gg-gn3re]

@@roman_mishin use infotimefmtnew in options

[@swithunliu1412]

how to cd the current directory with powershell (just like print 'S' with ranger)

[@Seacrest.]

Top it's gg. Aa? what the gg means?

[@GoatzombieBubba]

ueberzug is not maintained 7 months ago maintainer has no interest in keeping it going.

[@EricMurphyxyz]

Here, I made a video on what to use instead of Ueberzug: kzbin.info/www/bejne/pIW0iHxmhMafjM0

[@CipherOne]

Somebody pissed off the creator of ueberzug and he's chosen to archive the project and no longer maintain it. Use it while it works, or maintain it yourself, I guess ;[

[@xtrailinfinity]

It's great!! on WindowsPowerShell(WindowsOS) previewing text.

[@RogueCoder7505]

if only image and video previewer would work in fish shell....😞

[@user-xi9yc3rf1k]

dont work on fish ((

[@lindenhawthorn4761]

lf-gadgets didn't work for me[must be outdated], I endup up using luke smiths dot files for lf and made lfub, cleaner, & scope executable and got it working. For sxiv to work in lf I had to grab ~/.local/bin/rotdir and ~/.config/sxiv/exec/key-handler and make them executable. I grabbed all of his ~/.zprofile ~/.config/shell & ~/.config/zsh dotfiles too cuz he uses a lot of variables and sourcing files/directories.

You can map delete this way: map DD % gio trash "$f" It will send the file to the ~/.local/share/Trash