rove-fm

rove

A fast, keyboard-driven terminal file manager — miller columns, live syntax-highlighted previews, and a UI that paints itself in your terminal's own colors.

Built with OpenTUI + React, running on Bun.

What it does

rove gives you the ranger/lf/yazi-style three-pane view: parent directory on the left, current directory in the middle, preview on the right. Move through the tree with the keyboard and the panes shift with you, so you always have context about where you are and what's inside whatever you've got selected.

Features

• Miller columns — parent / current / child layout that follows your cursor as you move.
• Live file previews — text files open in the right pane with a line-number gutter; directories show their contents.
• Image previews — PNG, JPEG, GIF, BMP and TIFF files render right in the preview pane. rove uses the Kitty graphics protocol for crisp GPU images where the terminal supports it, and falls back to truecolor half-block rendering everywhere else. Images are downscaled to fit the pane (never upscaled).
• Syntax highlighting — tree-sitter powered, with 23 languages bundled out of the box: TypeScript, JavaScript, Markdown, Zig (via OpenTUI) plus Bash, C, C++, C#, CSS, Dart, Elixir, Go, HTML, Java, JSON, Kotlin, Lua, Python, Ruby, Rust, Scala, Swift and TOML. Unrecognized text still previews as plain text.
• Smart reads — only the first 128 KB of a file is read for previews, binary files are detected (and skipped) instead of garbling the screen, and tabs are expanded for stable rendering.
• Filetype icons — every entry gets a glyph (Nerd Font recommended).
• Status bar — selected file's icon, name, human-readable size, colored rwxr-xr-x permission bits, symlink indicator, and your scroll position (TOP / BOT / 42%).
• Terminal-native theming — rove reads your terminal's color palette and re-reads it live when your color scheme changes (via DEC mode 2031, with a polling fallback). Switch your terminal from light to dark and rove follows.
• Toggleable view settings — flip hidden files, .gitignore filtering, the preview pane, the metadata column, and directories-first sorting on the fly with single-key shortcuts.
• Shortcut overlay — press / for a centered cheat-sheet of every keybinding, with each toggle showing its current on/off state.
• Mouse scroll in the preview pane.

Getting started

Requires Bun (rove runs on the Bun runtime) and, ideally, a Nerd Font for the icons.

Install it globally from npm (the package is published as rove-fm; the command is rove):

bun install -g rove-fm
# or: npm install -g rove-fm

Then launch it anywhere:

rove            # open the current directory
rove ~/projects # open a specific directory
rove --help     # see all options

Running from source

bun install
bun dev         # watch mode
bun start       # one-off run

rove opens in the directory you pass it, defaulting to the one you launch it from.

Keybindings

Key	Action
↑ / k	Move selection up
↓ / j	Move selection down
← / h	Go to parent directory
→ / l / Enter	Enter directory
/	Toggle the shortcut overlay
.	Toggle hidden files
i	Toggle .gitignore filtering
p	Toggle the file preview pane
m	Toggle the metadata column
s	Toggle directories-first sorting
Esc	Close the shortcut overlay
Ctrl+P	Toggle the terminal palette inspector
Ctrl+`	Toggle the OpenTUI debug console
Ctrl+C	Quit

Project layout

File	Responsibility
src/cli.ts	CLI entry — argument parsing (yargs), boots the TUI
src/index.tsx	App — layout, navigation state, keybindings, start()
src/components/file-tree.tsx	Renders a column of directory entries
src/components/preview.tsx	File previews, syntax theme, filetype → grammar mapping
src/components/image-preview.tsx	Image rendering (Kitty protocol + half-block fallback)
src/components/statusbar.tsx	Bottom status bar
src/components/palette.tsx	Terminal palette inspector overlay
src/components/shortcuts.tsx	Keyboard-shortcut help overlay
src/lib/hooks.ts	useTerminalColors — live terminal palette tracking
src/lib/use-settings.ts	View settings + their toggle keybindings
src/lib/image.ts	Image decode/scale, protocol detection, Kitty encoding
src/lib/utils.ts	Directory reads, stat/permission formatting, preview reads
src/lib/icons.ts	Filetype → icon/color mapping
src/lib/types.ts	Shared FileNode / FileMeta types
src/grammars.ts	Registers the bundled tree-sitter grammars
src/grammars/	Bundled grammar.wasm + highlights.scm per language

Development

bun dev        # run with hot reload
bun run lint   # biome lint
bun run format # biome format --write
bun run check  # biome check --write

Tech

OpenTUI (core + React renderer) · React 19 · Bun · tree-sitter · Jimp (image decoding) · Biome.

Scaffolded with bun create tui.