Because file management shouldn’t be painful.

Five minutes, start to finish

Copying a handful of files into a new folder, in a second panel, without ever leaving the keyboard. Every key below is remappable.

1. ↑ ↓ to move, → to go into a folder ← goes back up. Enter does the same as →, and opens a file when the cursor is on one.
2. ⌘C on a file. Then the next one. Then the next Each press adds to the list rather than replacing it, so the files need not be next to each other. The header counts them as they go on. ⌘X builds a list to move instead.
3. n for a second panel It opens beside the first, not on top of it.
4. Tab to move between panels The focused panel has a coloured border — the one thing the design never lets you lose track of.
5. ⌘N, type photos/, Enter The trailing slash makes it a folder. Without it you get a file.
6. → to go into it, ⌘V to paste The whole list arrives at once, and pasting empties it — so the next ⌘C starts fresh. Large copies run in the background with a progress bar, and conflicts ask once, with an “apply to all” option.
7. ⇧A to select them all, ⌘B to rename at once Find and replace, add a prefix or suffix, or number them — with every old → new pair shown before anything is renamed.
8. ⌘W to close the panel Never the last one. ⌘Z undoes the move, the rename, or the trash — though not the copy, which is a thing that only ever added files.

On Linux that is Ctrl everywhere ⌘ appears above — one binding, correct on both.

If you would rather not leave the home row: j k move, l goes in and h goes back up. And instead of pressing ⌘C file by file, v starts selection mode, where j and k extend the selection as they move and one ⌘C takes the lot. Esc leaves it.

Prefer the mouse? ⌘click picks files out one at a time, Shiftclick takes a range, and dragging between panels moves within a disk or copies between two — hold Alt as you drop to be asked which.

Lost? ? lists every action and its keys. Esc backs out of whatever you are in — a preview, a filter, selection mode — and never quits.

, opens Settings, where the themes below can be picked from a list rather than typed into a file. It writes to the same config.toml and theme.toml you can edit by hand, comments and all — neither way is the “real” one.

Panels, not tabs

Panels are peers. None of them is the parent of another, and none of them is a preview of another — which is what separates this from Miller columns. Copying between two directories means putting them side by side and pressing two keys, never dragging a window across a screen.

Fast enough to leave closed

A file manager you keep open because it is slow to start is a file manager that is always in your way. Panefile targets a painted window in under 80 milliseconds, and every release measures it — a build that regresses more than 15% against the recorded baseline fails.

Everything from the keyboard

The mouse is supported and never required. Bindings are sequences of chords, so gh and dd work alongside Ctrl+C, and every one of them is remappable in a plain text file.

Themed in plain text

Twenty-three themes ship with it, all of them the real published palettes rather than approximations. Colours, spacing, row height and font are TOML; edit the file and the window restyles without restarting.

# ~/.config/panefile/theme.toml
[colors]
background     = "#1e1e2e"
text           = "#cdd6f4"
accent         = "#89b4fa"
directory      = "#89b4fa"

[ui]
row_height     = 24
panel_padding  = 8

Install

yay -S panefile

brew install andyjeffries/tap/panefile

cmake --preset release
cmake --build --preset release

Panefile is developed and tested on Arch + Hyprland and on macOS. X11 is best-effort. There is no hard dependency on any compositor.