How To Use The Amazing & Fast Yazi Terminal File Manager

When writing this blog post, I was using Yazi v0.4.1

Installation

I’m on macOS so I use homebrew to install yazi and all of the optional dependencies.

For the command you need for your system take a look at the installation instructions

brew install yazi ffmpegthumbnailer ffmpeg sevenzip jq poppler fd ripgrep fzf zoxide imagemagick font-symbols-only-nerd-font

Move to CWD When Exiting Yazi

This shell wrapper comes in handy so that you automatically move into the directory you’re in when exiting yazi.

If you are using zsh like me open the ~/.zshrc file with the editor of your choosing and add this to the bottom:

function y() {
	local tmp="$(mktemp -t "yazi-cwd.XXXXXX")" cwd
	yazi "$@" --cwd-file="$tmp"
	if cwd="$(command cat -- "$tmp")" && [ -n "$cwd" ] && [ "$cwd" != "$PWD" ]; then
		builtin cd -- "$cwd"
	fi
	rm -f -- "$tmp"
}

Then source the zshrc file by running:

source ~/.zshrc

Now you can use y to open yazi instead!

The code above works for bash or zsh, but you can set this up with other shells. Take a look at the documentation here

Setup Default Configuration

There are three configuration files for Yazi:

• yazi.toml - General configuration.
• keymap.toml - Keybindings configuration.
• theme.toml - Color scheme configuration.

These will all go in ~/.config/yazi

Let’s create them.

First create the yazi config directory:

mkdir -p ~/.config/yazi

On windows the config would go here instead: C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\yazi\config\

Now you can move into it:

cd ~/.config/yazi

Then finally create the three configuration files:

touch yazi.toml keymap.toml theme.toml

Then you can copy the default yazi configuration files for yazi.toml & keymap.toml & paste them into the yazi.toml & keymap.toml files we just created.

Now you can modify these defaults however you like. You can read more about the configuration options here & setting up keymaps here

Modifying Default Editor

To modify the default editor that is used when opening a code/text file or a directory you can modify the EDITOR environment variable.

For example, in zsh open the zshrc file with your editor of choice and add this to the bottom:

export EDITOR=nvim

Replace nvim with the editor’s command you would like to use

Installing A Flavor (For The Theme)

Make sure you are in the yazi config directory:

cd ~/.config/yazi

Now create a flavors directory

mkdir flavors

Then you can navigate here to find a flavor you like.

After finding one, run the command in the README.md to install it with the ya pack yazi package manager for plugins and flavors.

For example, you can install the catppuccin-mocha flavor like so:

ya pack -a yazi-rs/flavors:catppuccin-mocha

Once installed you can open the theme.toml file we created earlier with your editor of choice.

I’m using Neovim so:

nvim ~/.config/yazi/theme.toml

And then you can add the following to this file to use the flavor:

[flavor]
dark = "catppuccin-mocha"
light = "catppuccin-mocha"

Replace catppuccin-mocha with the name of the flavor you chose

Keymaps

One of the best ways to explore all of the keymaps available to you is to go through the default keymap.toml file here.

You can also see the available keymaps by pressing ~ or F1.

Alongside this take a look at the youtube video to see visual explanations of how the different keymaps work!

If you want to modify any of these you can just make changes to the default we copied into the keymap.toml file we created earlier.

That’s It! 🚀