I discovered two new CLI tools today that I absolutely love.

I only recently started using tmux, and now that I’ve escaped the rabbit hole that is ricing, I’ve started playing around with different tmux plugins.

One thing I’ve wanted for a while is a terminal file manager—I have primarily navigated the system with cd, ls, and tree. It’s the way I’ve done it for so many years that, even though I knew there was probably a better way, I’d just automatically fall into that pattern like muscle memory.

But no more of that nonsense! The combination of fzf and Yazi (with the shell wrapper) has made navigating the system much more enjoyable. Combine that with tmux (specifically tiling panes) and nvim… I mean, does it get more based than that?

The shell wrapper, which is in the Yazi Quick Start, is a very nice quality-of-life add-on. It changes the current working directory (CWD) to whatever directory I was exploring within the Yazi file manager. NICE!

So, within tmux, I run y instead of yazi—that’s the shell wrapper alias saved to my .bashrc. This loads Yazi with the ability to cd into the selected folder. Once Yazi is running, I use fzf to fuzzy-find the folder or file I’m looking for, then select it—I can preview it in Yazi and navigate up and down directories to find the one I want… and then I press q and I’m back at the shell in that selected directory. Sweetness.

It’s a little late, but I wanted to make sure I captured this because I want to keep using it, and my lack of memory permanence worried me that I’d forget about it in the morning and be back to carpal-tunnel-inducing directory switching again by lunch tomorrow.