fleek

fleek

A terminal file manager with real thumbnails and a responsive grid/list layout, built for Ghostty and tmux.

Actual 200×60 half-block capture. Demo artwork is generated for the screenshots.

Why fleek?

• See the file before you open it. Images, videos and PDFs get real 3:2 thumbnails, loaded lazily and cached on disk.
• Built for the terminal you already use. Kitty graphics with Unicode placeholders in Ghostty, Kitty and WezTerm, including inside tmux. Everything else gets a colored half-block fallback.
• Fast to drive. Arrows or hjkl for the grid or list, / or ctrl+f for recursive search, and a right-click menu for copy, cut, rename, trash and new folders.
• Fits the window you have. Full sidebar on wide terminals, and a two-column thumbnail grid with a sidebar drawer on narrow phone-sized windows.
• One binary, your config. A single Go binary with TOML themes, layout, sorting and extra sidebar places. No daemon, no Electron.

Screenshots

All screenshots are half-block captures from the current build.

Full-screen viewer	File actions
Full-screen viewer — space opens the selected image; arrows browse.	File actions — right-click or m to open, copy, cut, rename or trash.

Keyboard help	Settings
Keyboard help — every binding, scrollable in short windows.	Settings — theme, behavior, layout and image protocol, with a live preview.

Phone grid	Phone sidebar
Phone grid — two-column thumbnails below 60 columns.	Sidebar drawer — full labels instead of an icon rail.

Features

• 3:2 thumbnails for images, videos and PDFs
• Nerd Font folder tiles and file-type icons
• Places sidebar with mounted filesystems and free space
• Right-click a folder to add it to the sidebar, or remove it again
• Multi-select with shift/ctrl-click, shift+arrows or ctrl+a
• Tabs with independent directory, history, selection and scroll
• Responsive thumbnail grid on desktop and phones
• Sidebar drawer toggle on phones
• Selection borders, breadcrumbs and navigation history
• Recursive search across the current tree (/)
• Type-to-filter the current folder (f)
• Copy, cut, paste, rename, trash and new-folder actions
• Zip and tar.gz compress/extract from the context menu
• Batch rename with {name}, {ext} and {n}
• Restore or empty the Trash
• File properties, permissions, ownership, copy path, open with, duplicate and symlink actions
• Right-click context menu with an advanced actions page
• Full-screen image, video, PDF and text viewer
• Lazy thumbnail loading and a disk cache
• Kitty graphics for Ghostty/Kitty/WezTerm, with a half-block fallback
• Catppuccin Mocha palette by default
• TOML configuration for theme, layout, behavior and extra places
• In-app settings window with live theme preview and save-to-TOML

Requirements

• Linux
• Go 1.27 or newer to build
• A terminal with a Nerd Font installed
• Optional: ffmpeg for video frames
• Optional: pdftoppm from poppler for PDF pages

Install

From a checkout:

git clone https://github.com/StefanVonRanda/fleek.git
cd fleek
./install.sh

install.sh builds fleek, installs it to ~/.local/bin (or $PREFIX/bin), and writes a starter config to ~/.config/fleek/config.toml if you do not have one yet.

Or use Go directly:

go install github.com/StefanVonRanda/fleek@latest

Run fleek with no arguments to open the current directory:

cd ~/Pictures
fleek

Pass a directory to open it, or a file to open its parent with that file selected.

Usage

Mouse clicks select; double-click opens. The wheel scrolls. Sidebar places, breadcrumbs and toolbar icons are clickable. Right-click a folder to add or remove it from the sidebar. Shift+click selects a range; if your terminal reserves shift+click for text selection, set Ghostty's mouse-shift-capture = true or use alt+click for the same range. On phones, the top-left toggle (or tab) opens the sidebar drawer.

The actions menu includes More… for archive, batch rename, properties, permissions, ownership, copy path, open with, duplicate, symlink and terminal actions.

Search results show paths relative to the current directory. esc closes search and restores the folder; enter opens the selected result.

Small terminals

Below 90 columns the sidebar becomes a drawer toggled from the top bar, and the grid uses two thumbnail columns. The help panel scrolls with j/k, arrow keys or the wheel. Search expands to the full path bar under 50 columns, and menus and dialogs size themselves to the window.

Configuration

fleek reads ~/.config/fleek/config.toml ($XDG_CONFIG_HOME/fleek/config.toml) by default. Use --config PATH or FLEEK_CONFIG to load another file. examples/config.toml is the complete annotated example.

Press s (or ctrl+,) to open the settings window. It edits the theme palette, behavior, layout and image protocol with a live preview. ctrl+s (or s) saves to the active config file and esc discards the changes. Saving settings or a bookmark rewrites the file, so comments in a hand-edited config are not preserved.

[theme]
background = "#1e1e2e"
accent = "#cba6f7"
text = "#cdd6f4"

[behavior]
show_hidden = false
sort = "name"              # name, size, modified
sort_reverse = false
directories_first = true

[layout]
sidebar_width = 20         # 14-32 (preferred; hidden below 36 columns)
card_width = 25            # 25-40
gap = 2                    # 1-4

[images]
protocol = "auto"          # auto, tgp, halfblock

The full palette, every layout key and custom places live in examples/config.toml.

Extra places

[[places]]
label = "Code"
path = "~/code"
icon = "code"
color = "#89b4fa"

Available icon names are home, download, document, music, picture, video, code, trash, disk, bookmark and folder.

Right-click a folder and choose Add to sidebar to append it to this list. The same menu removes bookmarks you added.

Environment overrides

Thumbnails and preview images are cached under ~/.cache/fleek/thumbs. The cache is safe to delete.

Images and tmux

fleek chooses the image renderer at startup:

• Ghostty, Kitty, WezTerm: Kitty graphics with Unicode placeholders
• everything else: colored half blocks

Inside tmux, Kitty graphics require passthrough:

set -g allow-passthrough on
set -ga terminal-features ',xterm-ghostty:RGB'

The second line advertises truecolor support to tmux. Without it, tmux may quantize the image-ID colors and thumbnails will not render correctly.

Force a renderer when needed:

FLEEK_PROTOCOL=halfblock ./fleek ~/Pictures
FLEEK_PROTOCOL=tgp ./fleek ~/Pictures

The screenshots above use the half-block renderer: grid, viewer. It is also what terminals without Kitty graphics show.

Current limitations

• Linux is the supported platform for mount and font discovery.
• Sixel is not supported.
• Split panes, drag-and-drop and mounting/ejecting are not implemented yet.
• Overwrite/skip conflict prompts, operation progress/cancel and undo are not implemented yet.
• Video and PDF thumbnails require the optional external tools above.

License

MIT