Terminal File Manager nnn Adds Session Management, Rclone Cloud Storage Integration

nnn is a very fast file manager created to work seamlessly with desktop environments and GUI utilities. The ncurses based keyboard-driven terminal application should run smoothly on the Raspberry Pi, Termux on Android, Linux, macOS, BSD, Cygwin and WSL.

Besides basic file manager features (with tabs/contexts, bookmarks, search, and so on), the tool also various handy utilities like a disk usage analyzer (block/apparent), a fuzzy application launcher, batch renamer, and more. It's also extensible via a plugin system, and comes with many built-in plugins. For navigation, nnn supports navigate-as-you-type with directory auto-select. Search-as-you-type is also supported.

Other features include SSHFS mounts support, support for navigating using the mouse, batch operations on selections, multiple sorting options and a lot more.

Even though it comes with many features, the main nnn purpose is to be light and fast. See the Performance page from the nnn wiki for details.

nnn 2.8 was released recently (shortly followed by version 2.8.1 to fix an issue) with some cool new features. One of these features is session management support, which means you can save your current nnn session and restore it later. Press U and you'll be prompted to save, load or restore a session.

Another cool new feature in nnn 2.8 is Rclone integration. New to Rclone? Let me tell you a bit about it.

Related: How To Mount OneDrive In Linux Using Rclone (Supports Business And Personal Accounts)

Rclone is a command line cloud storage synchronization program that can synchronize from your file system to various cloud storage services (and the other way around), or directly between cloud storage services. The tool has support for many cloud storage services, including Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon Drive and S3, Mega, Microsoft OneDrive (personal and business accounts), Yandex Disk, ownCloud, NextCloud, pCloud, Box, and others. It runs on Windows, macOS, Linux, *BSD and Solaris.

Using nnn to browse (and mount) oneDrive thanks to its new Rclone integration

With nnn 2.8, you can mount and browse a Rclone remote directly from this file manager. You must firstly have some remotes added to Rclone, and once that's set up, open nnn and press c -- the command line tool will then ask you to choose between sshfs (by pressing s) or Rclone (by pressing r). Next, you'll need to enter the remote name (as you've entered it when adding it to Rclone), and nnn will mount it allowing you to browse its contents.

Yet another new feature in the latest nnn is the ability to mount archives, and view or modify them directly in nnn, without extracting them. This is done with the help of archivemount utility, so install this (e.g. on Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install archivemount) to be able to use the archive mount feature. To mount an archive in nnn press T.

There are even more new features and improvements in nnn 2.8:

run custom (non-shell-interpreted) commands like plugins
copy/move as workflow
key bind collision checker
allow plugins to control the active directory of nnn
better support for editing files in detached mode
support xargs with minimal options (as in BusyBox)
program option -R to disable rollover at edges
new plugins:

gutenread: browse, download and read from Project Gutenberg
suedit: edit file with superuser permissions
fzhist: fuzzy select commands from history, edit and run
renamer: an alternative to the native batch rename interface in nnn, to batch rename directory or selection using qmv or vidir
pskill: fuzzy list a process or zombies by name and kill
exetoggle: toggle executable status
treeview: informative tree output with file permissions and size

Download nnn

The nnn releases page has binaries for various Linux distributions like Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora and CentOS. As a side note, the Ubuntu 18.04 DEB from the nnn releases page worked flawlessly on my Ubuntu 19.10 desktop.

nnn is also available in the repositories of many popular Linux distributions. It's in Ubuntu (starting with Ubuntu 18.04), Linux Mint 19.*, Debian (Buster and newer), Arch Linux Community repositories, Fedora, and more. See the installation section for how to install nnn in your Linux distribution.

New to nnn? Press ? inside the application to see the available keys that you can use to perform various actions. Other than that, you only need to remember a few keys, like using the arrow keys to navigate, type / followed by your query to filter, and press q to exit.

You'll probably also want to check out its documentation. Also see its optional dependencies, which provide some extra functionality.