hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr1756.txt

Episode: 1756
Title: HPR1756: Ranger File Manager
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1756/hpr1756.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 08:53:03

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This is HPR Episode 1,756 Entitled Ranger File Manager.
It is hosted by me and is about 22 minutes long.
The summary is introduction to the Ranger Command Line File Manager.
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Hello again, this is Be Easy, signing in, taking some feedback from some of the discussion
from the summary podcast from HPR.
I'm introducing myself this time.
The first time I was exactly sure which handles I'm going to use, so I just left it blank.
But now, here I am once again, Be Easy and giving up a follow-up podcast to my initial one
about how I use Linux to run my small business.
There are some thoughts about this one project that I use a lot called Ranger,
and I just decided I'm going to go into it a little bit.
So Ranger is a command line utility for kind of like Midnight Commander.
It's NCURSE's based file manager, but it has VIM key bindings.
So I'm going to read just a little bit from the man page and then tell you a little bit about how I use it.
So from the man page, the description is Ranger is a console file manager with VI key bindings.
It provides minimalistic and nice curses interface with a view on the directory hierarchy.
The secondary task of Ranger is to figure out which program you want to open
for each type of file.
And so that's a brief introduction of what it is.
And the first thing you want to do is configure it a little bit.
You can hack it, you can customize it the way you like.
And I'm just going to go through a little bit about how I use it.
The project page is vanger.nongenu.org.
And it has some nice documentation there on how to use it.
Also you can find it in a lot of repos.
It's in the Debian and Ubuntu repos.
And also the Fedora repos and Arch.
And those are the ones I've checked.
So what else does it do?
Well, the main view of the system is like a three-paint view.
There's like the previous view.
There's a previous pane, the current pane, and the next pane.
So you use either arrows or your VI keys, which are H, J, K, and L for moving around.
So J and K up and down, or down and up, and then H and L left and right.
So you can use those, or you can use up and down left right.
You can use page up and page down if you want to just simply move around.
And so that's pretty cool.
It's kind of a tree view.
You can just go from tree to tree to tree.
You can go down to the next folder and then go over.
And then see what's inside of that folder.
And then go over and see what's inside of that folder.
And the really cool thing is that it previews files real-time.
The reason why I like this better than midnight commanders, because midnight commander,
you have to hit F3 to preview the file if it's a text file.
And it's really limited to the types of files that it can preview.
There's a lot more flexibility with Ranger.
So there's some optional dependencies that you can install that will allow you to preview lots of different types of files.
You can install Kaka Utils, so CACA-utils, for ASCII art.
So it'll turn JPEGs and BMPs into ASCII art in your screen.
So it's really cool to see, especially something with not a lot of detail,
or even some really close-up pictures.
You can see really cool ASCII art.
There's a highlight.
So Kaka Utils highlight is for syntax highlighting for code.
So I've seen it work for HTML, XML, CSS, C, Python.
It's the ones I've seen it, but I'm sure it doesn't work that.
A tool is another one that you can install that'll look inside of archive file.
So zip, tar, and I think even like dev files that'll look inside.
Links, or W3M, or e-links, to look at HTML, to give your preview of what the HTML page will look in,
and text my browser, PDF to text.
So that's PDF, T-O-T-E-X-T, and that will let you preview PDFs that are not scanned PDFs,
and PDFs that were turned into PDFs from either latex or word to some other way.
Transmission dash show will show you BitTorin information if you're looking at a BitTorin file.
And media info, or XF tool, or EXIF tool, for media file info.
I don't use media info anyway, and the media info dash GUI,
if I'm using a GUI application to look at the metadata for media.
And so it's pretty cool. So if you go to an MP3 file, and that's the file that you're highlighting
to preview on the right-hand side, so when you're looking at a file on the side of directory,
the next pane turns into a preview pane. And so that's what you'll either see the ASCII art or
the text or the media file information. And so if you go to an MP3 file, you'll see all the
information about the artist and the genre and the codex that was used to create it, all that kind
of stuff. If you've never used media info, you should just check that out anyway. It's pretty cool.
And the other thing is that the whole system is color coded, and there's three different themes
that you choose from. I think you probably download some other ones, but there is the default one,
which I just use. There's a jungle, which is more green for the main colors, and there's snow,
where white is the main color. And so there's a little bit of customization there, and I'm going to go
into a little bit later where you make these configurations. And then so when you're also
navigating through the files, you can preview the file in that next menu, but if you hit right
one more time when you're on that file, it'll actually open it in the launcher that you choose
to use the open file. And there's a config file to use to define that so you can either, for like a
text file, I use them. So it'll open a text file, and then it'll open a PDF file, and events,
it'll open up a MP3 file, and I think I haven't said it. So it's really useful, or you know,
like a ODT file to open up a LibreOffice. So you can navigate, you can preview. The only thing I
don't like is that there really isn't a preview for LibreOffice or open documents. So you actually
just have to hit right one more time and open those to see what it looks like.
Just as a side note, I also use this other program called NC-DU, which is NCURSES-DU to analyze
space that's available in different folders. So it gives you like a graphical view of how much
space you have in that current directory, and you can navigate similarly as you do in
and ranger, when you hit over, you can go inside of that folder and see which files are the
biggest in that next folder, and they can hit over again, or up, down, left, right, and see which
ones are the biggest ones in the next subfolder, and so you can find, I use it to find random files
that I didn't know were still in my system, I've taken up a lot of them. All right, going back
into the configuration of ranger. So one of the biggest things that you can do, first thing you
need to do is you have to create the ranger files, and to do all the config files, so the first thing
you do is you run ranger-config, copy-config equals all, and that'll make the default copies of
all the config files, and they're located in the home directory.config or slash.config-ranger-directory.
There's an rc.conf file, so rc.co.f, which is where you set all your key bindings in some of your
settings. There is the commands.py file, which is a Python script, which when you're in command mode,
so when we hit colon, there's a lot of commands you can do, just like you do in VIM, and it
tells you all those, and so a lot of the key bindings, you can key bind to things that are done in the command mode.
And you can customize those and add more Python scripts if you want to. We're just right inside of
there, and it lets you, it's also where you customize which files, which programs open the files.
There's also the scope.sh, which is where you define the files that you are used for making the
previews, and I am in a process of making one, I use markdown a lot, and I'm in the process of
making one that uses Python markdown to turn a markdown file into HTML, and then the set net
to links, so that it will preview the markdown file in HTML on my screen. And I think I have
it just to test it. Navigation is the next thing I want to talk about, so like I said, there's
up-down left right, you can go GG to go to the top, or capital G to go to the bottom, which is
like you do in VI. Capital E is used to edit a file, and it will open up using whatever editor you
chose. Like I said, there's page up and page down. Has for some of the other commands that you can
use, you can use spacebar to mark the current item to do stuff to it, so move it, delete it,
whatever. You can also use the command mark, and then a pattern, so colon the word m-a-r-k, and then
regular expression to mark all the ones that match a certain regular expression, and then you can
do other stuff to them, and some of the things you can do to the files or the folders is you can do
DD, and then PP to cut and paste something. You can use YY to yank it, and then PP to put it in
another place, which would be like a copy and paste instead of a cut and paste. You can also
have some other commands you can use, you can use colon touch, and then the file name to create a
new file, colon m-k-d-i-r or make-d-r to make a new directory. You can do colon grip to
and then your search criteria to find items, find words, or things that match in the different
files. You can either press the delete key, and it's going to ask you to confirm, and to delete,
or you can type in colon delete the word delete, and that'll also delete the file.
You can use colon rename, or colon bulk rename, colon rename, whatever one you're on, or whatever
ones you've marked, you rename, and it'll just rename it to whatever the next word that you put in,
the command. Next to that, there's also the bulk rename, and so what you do is you mark all the files,
and then you do bulk rename, and hit enter, and it's going to create a file out of that, and you edit that
file with the names that you want things to be changed to. So it's going to make a file with all the
names of the directories and the files that are in the directory that you're in, and then you can
like, on the computer, just delete words, or delete letters, characters, and replace them with other
characters, and we hit save, and I'll say do, I'm sure you want to do that, and then you say yes,
and it changes the names of all those files to whatever you've redained them in that file that
you edited. It's a pretty cool trick. To get it to work for me, I was getting this error,
and I don't know if it's because it's the old version of our different version of Python or
something, but I had to change something in the Python configuration script, where it was
trying to call something, it's called ranger.container.file, so it was looking for a from ranger.container.file
import capital word file. I just had to change the word ranger.container to ranger.fsobject.file
import file, because when I looked in the Python libraries, I couldn't find the container folder,
but I found, when I did a, when I did a grep for the word file for the capital F, I found it in the
fsobjects library, so I changed it to that and all of a sudden worked, so I guess that's the fix.
Another, some of the key bindings that you can use, you can use zh that'll toggle hidden files
on and off, so it starts off with hidden files not shown, you can hit zh to turn hidden files on,
you can use gn and that's going to make a new tab, and then gt or gcapitalt, and that's how you
navigate between tabs, so just like in vim or vi, you can do everything in the current screen,
you can make a new buffer, you can make a new tab, same thing you can make a new tab, so it's a tree,
but it's also, you can make separate tabs, some like it's stuff in separate tabs,
you can use the slash, the forward slash key, and type in characters to do a search on that
directory, just like you would, if it was a file in vi, where if you, if there's a file that was called
foo.txt, if you went slash and it foo, it would find foo, and then you could end, and they'll go next next next
to all the ones that have found in that directory, it's pretty cool, you can do capital v to go into visual
mode, I haven't used this very much, but I think it's another way to select multiple,
you can do colon open underscore with, and then you can use another command instead of using the default
file, the default program that opens up that application, you can use a different one, but using that,
I think you can also use, I think it's R, and it'll also do open with, and there's a lot of commands,
and a lot of different key binders and stuff, so the way that you can access all this stuff is
through the help, and there's four different ways to get into help, the main help you just hit
question mark when you're a major, and you'll be able to see the man page basically, you can do one
question mark, and that'll give you a list of all the key bindings, you can do two question mark,
and that'll list you all the commands that you can do command mode, and you can do three question mark,
and that will give you a list of all the settings, and so like I said, this is tip of the iceberg,
kind of like them where you can do a lot or you can do a little, but they get comfortable with it,
it doesn't take very much, you know, if you know how to use arrow keys, you can get a lot of
use out of it, and then that's how I use it, I read a lot of my notes just with a terminal open
full screen, because it doesn't really allow you to scroll through the files, because it's a
preview screen, so you'd have to open them to scroll through them, but if you have short enough
notes or short enough information in the files, in a full screen like 720 or 1080p screen,
you can see almost the entire file contents, and you can navigate, never even have to open up
other applications, you can spend a lot of time and ranger, so I use it not just for my small business,
just about any computer that I install, like I have Raspberry Pi, and I installed ranger
on it using both Raspbian and Pidora, just because it's an easy way to navigate through the file structure,
so that pretty much sums up what I'm going to talk about on this video, on this podcast,
and let me know if you have anything else that you want to talk about from my original post,
there's a couple of other things I want to cover, and let me know if there's anything
particular that you want to know about that I use, by no means an expert, but you know,
I've used things a couple times, you know, for a couple of months, and I've run into problems,
and I've fixed them, and the fact that I'm still using them means that none of the problems
I ran to were an issue, so hopefully that makes sense to everyone, and please give me feedback,
I love hearing the feedback about how to make the podcast better, when information
you would like more of, what you would like less of, and I'll probably do a couple more before
all of a sudden, thanks, bye!
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