Yazi
Yazi is a blazing-fast terminal file manager developed in Rust, using non-blocking async I/O for an efficient, user-friendly, and highly customizable file management experience. It features full asynchronous support, distributing CPU tasks across multiple threads to maximize resource use and improve performance.
It offers powerful async task scheduling with real-time progress updates, task cancellation, and internal prioritization. It supports multiple image protocols natively and integrates with Überzug++ for broad terminal compatibility. Additionally, Yazi includes built-in code highlighting and image decoding functionalities, along with a pre-loading mechanism to speed up file loading processes.
Installation
There are several ways to install Yazi on NixOS.
Temporary Shell
To temporarily use Yazi in your current shell session, run:
nix-shell -p yazi
System-wide
To install Yazi for all users on the system, add it to your configuration.nix:
programs.yazi.enable = true;
After adding the option, rebuild your system:
sudo nixos-rebuild switch
Home Manager
To install Yazi for a single user, add it to your Home Manager configuration:
programs.yazi.enable = true;
After adding the option, apply the changes:
home-manager switch
Configuration
As mentioned above, there are both NixOS options and home-manager options for configuring Yazi.
Advanced
programs.yazi = {
enable = true;
settings = {
manager = {
ratio = [
1
4
3
];
sort_by = "natural";
sort_sensitive = true;
sort_reverse = false;
sort_dir_first = true;
linemode = "none";
show_hidden = true;
show_symlink = true;
};
preview = {
image_filter = "lanczos3";
image_quality = 90;
tab_size = 1;
max_width = 600;
max_height = 900;
cache_dir = "";
ueberzug_scale = 1;
ueberzug_offset = [
0
0
0
0
];
};
tasks = {
micro_workers = 5;
macro_workers = 10;
bizarre_retry = 5;
};
};
}
Tips and Tricks
Installing Plugins
Many yazi plugins are packaged in nixpkgs.
There are some additional yazi plugins packaged in the nix-yazi-plugins flake. It also provides home-manager modules for configuring the plugins' options.
Bleeding edge
The upstream repository provides a flake so that Nix users can easily keep up with the bleeding edge.[1]
inputs = {
yazi.url = "github:sxyazi/yazi";
};
Afterwards, you can use the new package.
# Global
environment.systemPackages = [ yazi.packages.${pkgs.stdenv.hostPlatform.system}.default ];
# or, if you use the module
programs.yazi.package = yazi.packages.${pkgs.stdenv.hostPlatform.system}.default;
# Home Manager
home.packages = [ yazi.packages.${pkgs.stdenv.hostPlatform.system}.default ];
# or, if you use the module
programs.yazi.package = yazi.packages.${pkgs.stdenv.hostPlatform.system}.default;
Pre-built artifacts are served at https://yazi.cachix.org, so that Nix users don't have to build Yazi on their machine.[2]
nix = {
settings = {
substitute = true;
substituters = [
"https://yazi.cachix.org"
];
trusted-public-keys = [
"yazi.cachix.org-1:Dcdz63NZKfvUCbDGngQDAZq6kOroIrFoyO064uvLh8k="
];
};
};
Stylix integration
theme = with config.stylix.base16Scheme; {
filetype = {
rules = [
# Images
{
mime = "image/*";
fg = "#${base0B}";
}
# Videos
{
mime = "video/*";
fg = "#${base03}";
}
# Audio
{
mime = "audio/*";
fg = "#${base08}";
}
];
};
};
Stylix can do it automatically for you if the following option is set:
stylix.targets.yazi.enable = true;
Key mapping
# Hyprland
bind = [
"$mod, E, exec, kitty -e yazi"
];
Troubleshooting
RAR file extraction
By default, yazi depends on _7zz in nixpkgs for extraction and previewing purposes. This does not support RAR files by default. To enable support, you can override the _7zz in the dependencies into unfree rar version.
pkgs.yazi.override {_7zz = pkgs._7zz-rar; }