Yazi

Yazi ("duck" in Chinese) is a terminal file manager by sxyazi, written in Rust on non-blocking async I/O. Every operation — directory listing, preview generation, copying, image decoding — runs on background threads, so the UI never freezes on huge directories the way synchronous managers like ranger can. It ships Vim-style keybindings, multi-tab support, scrollable previews for images, videos, PDFs, archives, and syntax-highlighted code, plus bulk rename, visual mode, a file chooser, Git integration, a mount manager, trash-bin support, mouse support, and drag-and-drop.

Extensibility comes from a concurrent Lua plugin system with a built-in package manager for installing and pinning plugins and themes, and it integrates with ripgrep, fd, fzf, and zoxide out of the box. The "blazing fast" claim is provider-stated and explained in the project's own architecture article; no independent benchmarks were found. One honest caveat from the README itself: Yazi is in public beta and heavy development, so expect breaking changes. Free and MIT-licensed for macOS, Linux, and Windows.

Install via Homebrew (brew install yazi), your distro package manager, or the release zip from GitHub. Run yazi to launch. For the common "cd on exit" behavior, add the documented shell function (using --cwd-file) to your rc file. Configure keybindings, themes, and plugins in ~/.config/yazi/; install community plugins with the built-in package manager.