Excellent Utilities: broot – next gen tree explorer and customizable launcher

Last Updated on May 22, 2022

In Operation

If you’ve used the tree command you’ll encounter the problem that it produces page after page of output. Of course you can pipe its output to more or less.

But there’s a better way of viewing and navigating large directories.

Here’s an image of broot in action. Instructions on how to navigate are set out in the bottom bar.

What does broot offer?

• Provides a concise overview of a large directory.
• Find a directory by typing a few letters and hit alt and enter to navigate to the desired location. This provides a very efficient and fast way to navigate to a directory.
• Selects the most relevant file and helps you keep track of file hierarchy when searching.
• Run common file operations like ls, cp, mv, mkdir without losing the view of the file hierarchy.
• Open additional panels and perform file operations between elements in each panel. The software can display two panels which are useful for previewing files and copying/moving files between two locations, but you can add more panels if your terminal is wide enough.
• Preview files such as images without losing track of the file hierarchy. Search with fuzzy patterns or regular expressions inside a text preview panel.
• Apply a standard or personal command to a file. And apply commands to several files.
• Clipboard functionality.
• Disk usage functionality using the --sort-by-size flag.
• Check git statuses. Use :gf to display the statuses of files (what are the new ones, the modified ones, etc.), the current branch name and the change statistics.
• Tons of other flags and options as shown in the image below. Flags and options can be classically passed on launch but also written in the program’s configuration file.

Next page: Page 3 – Summary

Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Summary

Complete list of articles in this series: