A fast, modular terminal file manager for Linux, written in Rust — a spiritual successor to ranger that fixes its weak spots: slow startup, fragile image previews, and a hard-to-extend Python core.

Status: planning / learning project (see the roadmap).

Goals

Blazing-fast navigation and previews (kitty graphics protocol first, SIXEL / ueberzug++ / chafa fallbacks).
Out-of-the-box support for images, video, audio, PDF, DJVU, EPUB and Markdown — with every file-type module easy to disable or replace at runtime, no recompilation required.
Extension model that feels native to Linux users: drop-in scripts in any language first, embedded Lua scripting later.
Vim-style ergonomics: modal keys, tabs, marks, bulk rename, : command line.

This repo is also a learning lab

viexp is deliberately built as a guided learning project: Rust from scratch and technical English, one 20-hour sprint at a time (Josh Kaufman's "First 20 Hours" method). All documentation lives in English inside the Obsidian vault in this repo.

License

GPL-3.0-or-later — viexp is free software, and so must be anything built from it: whoever distributes it or a derivative work must share the source under the same license.