pane-fm

A themeable file manager for Hyprland. Built with Tauri, Svelte, and Rust.

GTK file managers are held hostage by libadwaita's anti-theming philosophy. pane-fm is a from-scratch file manager that you actually control the look of — just CSS.

Heavily inspired by yazi, which is incredible — if you want a terminal file manager, use yazi. pane-fm exists for people who want something between a traditional GUI file manager and a terminal-based one: vim keybinds and keyboard-first navigation, but with a visual preview panel, drag and drop, and a right-click menu.

Is building a file manager on a webview a good idea? Probably not. WebKit has a non-trivial memory baseline, decoded images accumulate in browser cache outside your control, and every Rust call crosses an IPC boundary. A native TUI like yazi (~70k lines of pure Rust) will always be faster and lighter. pane-fm is an experiment in how far you can push the webview model — not a daily driver meant to compete with purpose-built tools.

Install

Arch Linux (AUR):

yay -S pane-fm-git

From source:

git clone https://github.com/jakeb-grant/pane-fm.git
cd pane-fm
bun install
bun run sync-icons
bun run tauri build
# Binary at src-tauri/target/release/pane-fm

Requires: Rust, Bun, webkit2gtk-4.1

Features

Navigation

• Yazi-inspired keyboard navigation (vim keys, chords, visual mode)
• Tabs with vim-style switching (gt/gT, 1-9) and session restore
• Back/forward/up navigation with history
• Fuzzy filter and recursive file search
• Command palette (Ctrl+Shift+P)

File Operations

• Create, rename, copy, move, delete with progress and cancellation
• Trash support (freedesktop spec)
• Compress/extract archives (zip, tar.gz, tar.xz, tar.zst, tar.bz2)
• Drag and drop (internal + cross-app)
• Multi-select (Space, visual mode, Ctrl+A, Shift+click)
• $EDITOR integration for text files

Preview

• Syntax-highlighted text preview (Web Worker, non-blocking)
• Image thumbnails, PDF preview, directory listing
• LRU cache with adjacent entry prefetch for instant navigation

Customization

• CSS theme system with hot-reload
• 3 bundled themes: Catppuccin Mocha, Nord, Dark Minimal
• Configurable keybinds via ~/.config/pane-fm/config.toml
• Custom right-click actions (shell commands with placeholders)
• ~1,100 Material Icon Theme SVGs with light/dark mode

System Integration

• Sidebar with XDG bookmarks and mounted/unmounted drives
• Click-to-mount via udisks2
• "Open With" reads .desktop files
• Filesystem watching (live directory updates)
• MIME detection (extension + magic bytes)
• Responsive layout adapts to window width

Theming

Themes are plain CSS files that override :root variables. No special format, no build step.

# ~/.config/pane-fm/config.toml
[general]
theme = "nord"

Three starter themes are installed to ~/.config/pane-fm/themes/ on first launch. Create your own by copying one and editing the CSS variables:

:root {
    --bg-primary: #1a1a2e;
    --bg-secondary: #16213e;
    --text-primary: #e0e0e0;
    --accent: #e94560;
    /* ... see full list below */
}

Theme files are watched at runtime — edits apply instantly.

Window transparency: Add --bg-opacity: 85%; to your theme for transparent backgrounds. Works out of the box on Hyprland and other Wayland compositors with transparency support.

Custom Actions

Add shell commands to the right-click menu:

[[actions]]
name = "Edit in Neovim"
command = "ghostty -e nvim %f"
context = "file"

[[actions]]
name = "Set as Wallpaper"
command = "hyprctl hyprpaper wallpaper eDP-1,%f"
context = "file"
mime = "image/*"

[[actions]]
name = "Make Executable"
command = "chmod +x %f"
context = "file"
refresh = true

Stack

src/                              # Frontend (Svelte 5)
├── routes/+page.svelte           # Layout shell + keybind wiring
├── lib/
│   ├── stores/
│   │   ├── fileManager.svelte.ts # Navigation, file, selection, clipboard state
│   │   ├── tabs.svelte.ts        # Tab management
│   │   └── dialogs.svelte.ts     # Dialog/busy/progress state + orchestration
│   ├── keybinds.ts               # Keybind/chord definitions + config overrides
│   ├── commandRegistry.ts        # Command list for palette + help dialog
│   ├── fileOps.ts                # File operation handlers
│   ├── contextMenu.ts            # Context menu item builders
│   ├── commands.ts               # Tauri IPC wrappers
│   ├── errors.ts                 # Structured error types + helpers
│   ├── constants.ts              # Shared constants + text/image/PDF detection
│   ├── highlight.ts              # Syntax highlighting (highlight.js language maps)
│   ├── highlightWorker.ts        # Web Worker for non-blocking syntax highlighting
│   ├── previewCache.ts           # LRU preview cache (5MB, mtime-validated)
│   ├── transitions.ts            # Shared transition functions (fade, pop, fly)
│   ├── icons.ts                  # Material Icon Theme SVG lookup
│   ├── icons.gen.ts              # Generated icon maps (from sync-icons script)
│   ├── utils.ts                  # Path/format helpers
│   └── components/               # Presentational components

src-tauri/src/                    # Backend (Rust)
├── lib.rs                        # Tauri builder + command registration
├── config.rs                     # TOML config loading + default config generation
├── error.rs                      # AppError enum (structured errors)
├── progress.rs                   # Shared progress emission + cancellation
├── fs_ops.rs                     # FileEntry/DriveEntry models, read_directory, MIME, file ops
└── commands/
    ├── config.rs                 # get_config + watch_config commands
    ├── file_ops.rs               # Directory listing, create/rename/copy/move/delete, properties
    ├── archive.rs                # Compress/extract with progress + cancellation
    ├── apps.rs                   # Open files, .desktop file parsing, Open With
    ├── search.rs                 # Recursive file search with streaming results
    ├── trash.rs                  # Freedesktop trash list/restore/empty
    ├── drives.rs                 # Drive detection (lsblk) + mount (udisksctl)
    ├── watcher.rs                # Filesystem watching for live directory updates
    └── theme.rs                  # Theme loading, file watching, default theme installation

Development

bun install
bun run sync-icons   # generate Material Icon Theme SVGs (first time only)
bun run tauri dev

# Checks
cargo check --manifest-path src-tauri/Cargo.toml
cargo clippy --manifest-path src-tauri/Cargo.toml
cargo test --manifest-path src-tauri/Cargo.toml
bunx svelte-check --tsconfig ./tsconfig.json
bunx biome check --write

Roadmap

See ROADMAP.md for planned features.

License

MIT