Manage your files
Shed your clunky graphical file management habits and let Jonni Bidwell show you the grown-up way to wrangle files
Jonni Bidwell
OUR EXPERT
Jonni Bidwell uses vim and i3 on an Eee PC, counting his words using wc, regex marks the spot, but his time management’s not on a par with that of his files.
You’d think after this file management extravaganza of an issue (see Roundup, HotPicks) you’d think we’d have had enough. But no, it seems we’re hell bent on having you organise your files (it’s synchronicity, we plan nothing! -Ed) this month. So listen up. Nnn, or n cubed, bills itself as the fastest file manager ever written. It’s based on Noice, so the name is a recursive acronym for Nnn’s Not Noice.
We really liked our terminal offering in the Roundup, Ranger, but nnn takes things to the next level. It’s written in C, and aims to have as small a memory footprint as possible. As a result, it’s pretty minimal and won’t be to everyone’s tastes. Heck, it doesn’t even have a configuration file, so if you want to change things you can do so through environment variables, plugins and command line switches.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. You can install nnn in Ubuntu with:
$ sudo apt install nnn