NNN
Discover the supercharged file manager
The problem of plenty has long plagued GUI managers where many tools offer similar features. Shashank Sharma recreates the situation on the CLI.
OUR EXPERT
Shashank Sharma is a trial lawyer in Delhi and an avid Arch user. He’s always on the hunt for affordable geeky memorabilia.
Back in LXF249 (simpler, happier times – Ed), we discussed the FFF file manager, which scoffs at traditional file managers in its appearance and functionality. Our tool of choice this issue, nnn, is cut from the same cloth. The project was originally forked from Noice, which is a small ncurses-based file manager, hence the name Noice is Not Noice (nnn), but the project has since dropped the acronym and now prefers to be known only as nnn, or n³.
Many distributions carry nnn in their software repositories and the project’s GitHub page (https:// github.com/jarun/nnn) provides a list of these, and the version of nnn on offer. Unfortunately, many distributions carry older versions of nnn in their repositories, but if you’re running the latest releases of Debian 12, Fedora 34+. Arch, or Void Linux, you’ll find the latest 4.4 release in the software repositories. Additionally, nnn utilises openSUSE’s build service to provide installable binaries for distributions such as Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu. If you’re either unwilling or unsure about installing it from source, the project also provides a portable static binary, which enables you to use nnn without installation.