Yazi

Yazi is a free, MIT-licensed terminal file manager written in Rust by @sxyazi, built from the ground up on non-blocking async I/O. We rate it 86/100 — the fastest TUI file manager you can install today, and the only one in the ranger / nnn / lf / broot lineup that ships native Kitty, Sixel and iTerm2 image previews out of the box.

What is Yazi?

Yazi (the name means “duck” in Chinese) is a single Rust binary that gives you a vim-keybound, dual-pane file manager inside any terminal. The project was started by sxyazi with first public commits in September 2023, is licensed MIT, and lives at sxyazi/yazi on GitHub where it has crossed 33,000 stars and is mirrored on Homebrew, WinGet, Chocolatey, AUR, Nix, snap and cargo.

What makes Yazi different from the established TUI file managers (ranger, lf, nnn, broot) is the runtime: every I/O operation is asynchronous and CPU work is fanned out across threads, so navigating a directory with 100,000 entries or scrubbing through a folder of 4K JPEGs no longer blocks the UI. The official blog post “Why is Yazi fast?” walks through the architecture: a Tokio-driven event loop, pre-loading and caching layers, and a publish-subscribe Lua bus for plugins.

Key Features of Yazi

• Full async I/O: Every read, copy, paste, delete and search runs on Tokio, with a real-time progress pane and per-task cancellation. Compared to ranger’s blocking Python loop, opening a 50,000-file directory is roughly instant rather than two-to-three seconds.
• Built-in image and video previews: Kitty unicode placeholders, iTerm2 inline images, Sixel and Konsole’s legacy Kitty protocol are all native — no w3m-imgdisplay hack. Überzug++ is supported as a fallback for X11/Wayland and Chafa for ASCII art on plain TTYs.
• Lua plugin system: A documented Lua API covers UI plugins, custom previewers, preloaders, fetchers and a publish-subscribe data bus. Plugins and themes (“flavors”) are managed by the built-in ya pkg command, with one-line install and version pinning.
• Vim-keybound everything: hjkl navigation, visual mode for batch selection, / search, r to bulk-rename through your $EDITOR, and an OSC 52 clipboard so yanked paths survive over SSH.
• First-class integrations: ripgrep, fd, fzf and zoxide are wired in by default — type z and Yazi jumps to your most-used directories without any plumbing.
• Multi-tab + virtual filesystem: Tabs, scrollable previews of PDFs, archives, code and videos, plus a virtual-filesystem layer that lets community plugins expose remote SFTP, S3 and even Git trees as if they were local folders.

What Users Say About Yazi

On the recurring “Yazi is the best terminal file manager” Hacker News thread, the most-upvoted comments cite raw speed (“ranger feels like a slideshow after this”) and the responsiveness of the maintainer — non-trivial issues routinely close within 24 hours. r/commandline and r/unixporn rice-screenshot threads have made Yazi the default file manager featured next to Neovim and Zellij in 2025–2026 dotfile setups.

The most consistent complaint, and the main reason we capped the rating at 86, is platform parity on Windows: Microsoft’s ConPTY layer still blocks several image-preview protocols natively, so Windows users either run Yazi inside WSL or accept Chafa ASCII previews. Other recurring grumbles: the Flatpak edition ships in a sandbox that breaks file(1) mimetype detection unless you set YAZI_FILE_ONE, and Yazi is not yet packaged in Debian stable, so apt users have to use the upstream tarball or cargo.

Yazi Pricing

Yazi is fully open source under the MIT License and free for personal and commercial use. There is no paid tier, no hosted product, no telemetry and no account. Pre-built binaries cover macOS (Intel and Apple Silicon), Linux (glibc and musl), Windows (native and WSL) and FreeBSD; package managers include Homebrew, WinGet, Chocolatey, AUR, Nix, snap and cargo install yazi-fm yazi-cli.

Plan	Price	What you get
Yazi	$0 forever	Full feature set, all platforms, source code, no account, all plugins free via ya pkg

Who Should Use Yazi?

Best for: Terminal-first developers who already live in Neovim/tmux/Zellij and want a file manager that matches that latency budget; sysadmins who need to scrub through huge directories on remote machines over SSH; anyone who has been waiting for ranger to feel snappy on a 4K monitor.

Not ideal for: Windows-only users who can’t use WSL (the native ConPTY image-preview story is still rough), or anyone who wants a stable-API tool — Yazi is in public beta, ships CalVer releases roughly every two weeks, and breaking changes to the Lua plugin API still happen.

Pros and Cons

Pros:

• Genuinely faster than ranger / nnn / lf / broot on directory open and preview switching.
• Best-in-class image preview — the only TUI file manager that supports Kitty, iTerm2 and Sixel natively.
• Lua plugin manager with one-line install (ya pkg add yazi-rs/plugins:git).
• MIT licensed, no telemetry, single-binary install on every major OS.
• Active maintainer with extremely fast issue triage on GitHub.

Cons:

• Public beta — the Lua plugin API is still subject to breaking changes between minor releases.
• Native Windows image previews are limited until ConPTY catches up; WSL recommended.
• No GUI settings panel; configuration is TOML and Lua only.
• Not yet in Debian stable repositories.

Alternatives to Yazi

ranger is the venerable Python file manager — richer plugin ecosystem, but blocking I/O makes it feel slow on big directories in 2026. lf (Go) is closer to Yazi philosophically but has no image preview and a smaller feature set. nnn wins on resource footprint (sub-10 MB RAM) but is intentionally minimal. broot is the only competitor with comparable polish, and remains the best choice if your workflow is fuzzy-tree-search rather than two-pane navigation. We have full reviews of Lazygit and Atuin for adjacent terminal tooling.

Verdict: Is Yazi Worth It?

Yes — if you spend most of your day in a terminal and you’ve ever felt ranger stutter, Yazi is a strict upgrade. The combination of async I/O, native image previews, a real Lua plugin system and a single-binary install is unmatched in the space. The 86/100 reflects two real costs: it’s still in public beta with a churning plugin API, and the Windows native experience trails macOS and Linux. For everyone else, it is now the default recommendation.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Yazi free?

Yes. Yazi is 100% free and open source under the MIT License. There are no paid tiers, no telemetry, and no account is required.

What platforms does Yazi support?

macOS (Intel and Apple Silicon), Linux (glibc and musl), Windows (native and WSL) and FreeBSD. Install via Homebrew, WinGet, Chocolatey, AUR, Nix, snap or cargo install yazi-fm yazi-cli.

How does Yazi compare to ranger?

Yazi is a Rust async-I/O rewrite of the same idea. Compared to ranger’s Python blocking loop, opening huge directories and switching previews is dramatically faster, and Yazi ships native Kitty, Sixel and iTerm2 image protocols that ranger requires plugins to approximate.

Is Yazi open source?

Yes. Source code is available at github.com/sxyazi/yazi under the MIT License.

Does Yazi support image previews on Windows?

Partially. Native Windows Terminal supports Sixel previews from v1.22.10352.0 onwards; for full Kitty / iTerm2 protocol coverage, run Yazi inside WSL with a graphics-protocol-aware terminal such as WezTerm.