You've been browsing files wrong

You've got to try terminal file browsing. Seriously, it will unlock levels of productivity you've never seen before. Check this out. By just using my keyboard and a terminal file browser called Yazy, I can do amazing things. I can move files from one destination to another, just like this. I can also rename files super easily with one keystroke. Let's rename this to something different. I'm not that creative. Sorry. I can also go into a directory and select multiple files that I want to move or take an action on. I can yank those. I can move them to another folder right in here. And I can rename them just like this. It's super easy. I can also fuzzy filter on all my folders so I can easily get to the directory that I want to get to. I can fuzzy filter also on files so I can find the exact file that I want to get to. And Yazi has some amazing features built in. So, if you install the right packages to support it, you can do amazing things like inspect the inside of compressed files or see thumbnails for previews of movie files. Also, if I hit enter, it will automatically open this in the movie player. There's a little behind-the-scenes action of my latest short. Let's say you're on Linux and you found a package. >> Pretty cool. But the best part about this is that it's not just for neck beards and nerds like myself. Anyone and everyone should be using terminal file browsing. It's so much fun and I promise it's not as scary as it may look. So, in this video, I'll show you what a terminal file browser is and why it's so productive. So, let's take our mouses and throw them away. This video is about Yazi. I should I should probably go get that. Now, Yazi is built in Rust, so you know it's blazing fast and definitely has a great trademark policy. Don't worry if you don't get that joke. It wasn't that great. Sorry. So, to install Yazi, I'm currently on Linux. Actually, I'm on Arch Linux, by the way. So, to install Yazi, I can type yay-s. And that's how you install it. It's actually available in many different popular distributions. In fact, it's available pretty much everywhere. For installation, we can see that it's available on Arch Linux. It's available on Nyx. Ew. But it's also available on Windows, on Mac OS through Homebrew or Mac ports. It's available for Debian. It's available for everything that you could want to install Yazi on. So, if you have a computer, you could probably install Yazi on it. And once you have Yazi installed, you can just type Yazi and you can see well, all of your files in your current directory. So, let's go over how to use it and why it's so cool. So, Yazi is pretty amazing out of the box. You can see that we have all of our files and directories in front of us right here. But how do we move around and figure out where to go? Well, there's a few ways to do it. Now, Yazi supports out of the box using your arrow keys. You can go down to go down these directories or up to go up your directories or files, but I prefer the vim keys which is HJ KL. It's uh H for left, J for down, K for up, and L for right, or lur for short. So, I like to use my Vim keys. So, now I'm going to go J for down, K for up. And if I want to drill into a directory, I can type L or write to go into that directory. And then we can see that it goes into that next directory. And I can keep continuing on and on. Now, what's really cool is out of the box also, Yazi provides previews for all of your files. So when you want to look at a Ruby file, for instance, this is a Ruby on Rails project. I can actually see that these are all of my let's say migrations because this is the this is the directory that I'm in. All of my migrations have previews to them. That's pretty neat. And then when I hit enter, what happens is it'll actually open it in my editor, which for me is Neovim, which is awesome. So let me just quit Neoim. And now I'm [music] back in Yazy. That's a really easy way to sort of use Yazi for opening files that you're interested in. Hey gang, let me talk to you really quick about this video sponsor, Warp. [music] Warp is an amazing agentic development environment. Now, Warp's been a supporter of this channel for a long time now, and back in the day, it started off as an amazing terminal. Now, Warp is still an amazing terminal, but it has so much more to it now. It has built-in AI, so you can type right with the AI from within your terminal interface. And it also has a coding agent. So from within this project, we can actually open up a file and we can edit our code in here. We can add things as context actually use AI from within our terminal environment on this file and it keeps you all within your flow. It's amazing. There's also agent multi-threading and management. And on top of all these features, there's something that I think is pretty amazing. Warp drive. Now, Warp Drive solves what I think is a little bit of a problem for me and my current day-to-day usage of AI, which is giving context to your AI. With Warp Drive, you can share commands and knowledge with you and [music] your teammates. It's amazing. Check out Warp at warp.dev. It's available everywhere, including Linux, which I am using on Arch Linux right now. Go check them out. Okay, now let's get back to Yazy. Now, as cool as this view is, let's just say that you don't want to have to keep going back and forth between all your directories every single time you want to move a file. How do you quickly get to a directory that you know you want to get to? Well, with Yazi, you can type capital Z and it will use FZF as a fuzzy finder to find your directory. So, let's do that now. But wait a minute, FZF is not installed. Well, that's pretty easy. While I install FZF, let me just explain. This was done as demonstration purposes to just show off how great Yazi is at telling you when something isn't installed that it expects. It expected FZF to be installed and it wasn't. So instead of failing silently or blowing up, it gave you a warning and it told you, hey, install FZF if you want to use that command. So we open up Yazi again and we type shift Z. Now that will bring us to FZF. In fact, this is actually Zoxside using FZF to list all of its directories that it remembers. Now, instead of just navigating my files and directories using either FZF or by going left and right by going up and down my directory tree, I can actually do some pretty amazing things with files themselves. Let's check that out. In my downloads folder, I can hit right to go into my downloads folder, and I can check out what's here. What's cool about Yazi is it has some amazing defaults for previews and looking at different kinds of files. Now, you already saw what it did with code. It showed a nice little preview for that code, but it actually has some really great implementations for previewing things in your terminal for other types of files. Now, an amazing thing that Yazi does is it uses ffmpeg, the library, to show a thumbnail of a video file. So, if you're not sure if you have a bunch of videos on your system, which I do because I'm a content creator, then you might not be able to know exactly what video you're looking at. So, it's cool that Yazi will produce a thumbnail using FFmpeg under the hood when you want to look at your videos through Yazi. Next up, Yazy will also inspect compressed files. But, as you can see here, you need sevenzip installed. So, let me just go ahead and do that right now. Yay. S7 zip. >> [music] >> This is a program that will allow us to inspect zipped files or compressed files in our system. So, let's open up Yazi again. We can go back to downloads and now we can actually see the contents of these compressed files using sevenzip. Pretty amazing. But it gets even better than that. Yazi allows you to also preview out of the box [music] images in your terminal. Now, you actually need a specific terminal in order to do this. namely a terminal that supports maybe uh Kitty's open graphics protocol or Uber Zug which I think you can install on many different terminals but as long as your terminal can support displaying images in itself then Yazi will allow you to preview images in your terminal and I think this is kind of a game changer because I have a workflow where I move images from my folders to my projects and it's kind of nice to just see which ones I want to move as opposed to the ones that I don't want to move and it's great to have that little preview there now to show this off a little bit more. I can open up a different terminal like elacrity and elacrity on this system does not have something installed to allow it to preview images. So if I open up Yazi and I go down to my downloads, I can see here that I do not get an image preview. [music] So it's important that you have a specific terminal that supports Kitty's open graphics protocol. Now obviously the Kitty terminal does this. I use Ghosty as my main terminal and of course it uses Kitty's open graphics protocol under the hood for graphics. So it supports this out of the box, but something to keep in mind. Now on top of this, Yazi also has a plugins [music] feature that allows users to create plugins with Lua. Now this is still in beta, but it's very promising. I could see some amazing plugins coming for Yazi out of this beta. Now, I'm ready to show off some workflows for you to show you how powerful Yazi is when it comes to just keeping your hands on the keyboard to manipulate and move files around, but I don't love the theme here. You see, I'm a big cat pooing guy. Meow. And I see that Yazi doesn't really play that nicely with my terminals Cat Pooin theme. You see down here, I actually can't really see what this text says. And on the bottom right here, I also can't see the text there. So, I'd like to change that a little bit. Well, as it turns out, Yazi is also very configurable. You can configure Yazi using three different files. Yazi dottoml is where you want to fine-tune your default settings. The next is keymap.toml which if where you guessed it is where you want to put your key maps if you want any special key maps for your workflows in Yazi. And the last [music] is theme.toml. Now this is where I want to focus because I want my Yazi install to look better with my cat puin theming [music] in my terminal. So let's go ahead and check that out. Now, of course, as you may have guessed, there is a port for Yazi with the Capuchin theme. So, let's go ahead and install that. We can click on themes. We click on Mocha, and then we click on Hm. I like the blue one. So, I can actually just copy this file. I can then open the config Yazi theme.toml file and paste everything in there. Now, the next time I launch Yazi, we can see, yep, Yazi now looks fantastic. This Capuchin theme for Yazy perfectly matches the Capuchin theme [music] for my terminal. We can see down on the bottom left and on the bottom right, the text that used to be kind of not very visible looks perfect now. And even the previews for all my files now look really nice as well. They did before, but they look even better now. Okay, so now let's show off some workflows when using Yazy in my day-to-day work. Now, this is something that I think is applicable for everyone, not just neck beards like myself. And to prove how flexible and awesome Yazi is, I'm going to show you three different ways to copy images into a different folder using Yazi. Now, of course, this works for any real file type, but I'm just going to show off a few different features along the way. So, I can go into my downloads folder. I have my logos folder as well. I hit L to go right. Now, I can just type Y to yank this file. Now, if I want to move this file, I can do a few different things. One is I can type Y to yank it. That will actually let me transport this file almost copy it if you will into another place. I can type H and H again to go back to my git learn [music] app assets images and then hit P to paste. Now you can see after pasting this file just showed up right here. Now of course I can rename this file to something different if I want to by typing R. R will allow me to rename the file. I can just type backspace to get to the end here and type um logo for something.png. Enter. Okay, great. That's one way to move a file. So now let's go back to our downloads folder, but I don't want to traverse my whole entire file system again. So let's type shift Z. Now I can go back to downloads. So now I'm already at my downloads folder. So now I just need to go to my logos again. And I want to um well, you know what? This time I had a few logos that I wanted to move. So, how about I take an action on a bunch of different files? Well, you can do that by typing space. Space space space will select these three files that you can see are highlighted on the left. And then you type the action you want. Now, for me, instead of yanking these files, I'm going to cut them. This will delete them in their current place and then paste them somewhere else on my system. So, I'll type X to do that. This will then cut these files for me. Now I can go back to where I was by typing shift Z again, typing learn, and now I'm already in my learn directory. App assets images. As you can see, actually Yazi remembered the last place I visited. So it's easier to just sort of keep hitting right or L for me to get to where I want to be. Now I can paste all my files. We can see all three of them are right here. And I can also rename them all if I want to. R to rename. Now this opens up for me a Vim buffer that allows me to rename these. type graph. I'll just do one, two, three. Now, let's see how that works. I write and quit that buffer. Then all I have to do is hit yes. And here we go. All three of these files were now renamed. You can do bulk movement, bulk renaming, and all kinds of other bulk actions on your files in Yazy. Just like that. Super simple, really straightforward, really fun. So, that's just a preview of some of the power that Yazi can give you and some of the performance boosts it can give you in your day-to-day work. You see, that was super fun to just flip through all my files to easily go back to where I was before. And it was really, really easy. And it's very straightforward while memorizing only a few little key commands. Now, if you want to go a little bit deeper into Yazi, then please check out their excellent website. It has installation instructions, quick starts, how to configure it, all kinds of amazing things. Check out Yazy and subscribe for more Vim Bash and Linux tips and tricks. And hey, thanks nerds. >> [music]

Try Warp: https://warp.dev LEARN: https://learn.typecraft.dev/ X: https://x.com/typecraft_dev You’ve got to try terminal file browsing. It will unlock levels of productivity you’ve never seen before. By just using the keyboard and a file browser called “yazi”, I can: move files around, rename them, move around directories with ease. Yazi even has a plugin system, so you can do some crazy stuff like view videos IN YOUR TERMINAL. But the best part about this, is that it’s not just for neckbeards and nerds like myself. ANYONE and EVERYONE should be using terminal file browsing! It’s so much fun, and I promise its not as scary as it may look. So in this video, I’ll show you what a terminal file browser looks like, and why its so productive!