Newt

"If Altap Salamander and VS Code had a baby..."

newt-fm.org — website, downloads and the user manual.

A keyboard-centric, dual-pane file manager for Linux, macOS and Windows in the orthodox tradition — two panes, a terminal underneath, F-keys for everything — built with Tauri 2: a Rust backend and a React/TypeScript frontend.

Features

• Two panes, one terminal — side-by-side listings over a multi-tab terminal (xterm.js), with git status in the list and a newt command in the terminal that drives the panes (newt cd, newt select, newt cp, …).
• Keyboard-first — F-key operations, quick search by typing, a regex filter, a command palette, Go to File (Mod+G), and every command rebindable per context.
• Remote sessions — SSH, Docker, Podman, Kubernetes, WSL and elevated (pkexec / UAC) sessions run the whole app — panes, terminals, operations — on the other side through a small agent binary. Any of those can also be mounted in a single pane, and your own machine can stay reachable from a session (if you allow it), so local↔remote copies are just copies.
• Virtual filesystems — S3 (with ACLs, storage class and metadata) and SFTP; zip, 7z, tar and cpio archives and ISO/UDF disc images browsed in place, even when they live on S3. Find in Folder streams its results into a pane you can operate on like any directory.
• File operations — copy, move, delete, batch rename (regex, live preview) and pack to archive across any pair of filesystems, streaming end to end, with progress, conflict resolution and cancellation.
• Viewer and editor — F3 views text, tables, Markdown, hex, images, media, PDF and a structural dissection of some 1,600 formats, streaming remote files by range; Quick View previews them beside the list. F4 edits in Monaco.
• Configurable — file associations for Enter, F3 and F4; user commands as Jinja templates over the selection (F9); one hot-reloaded settings.toml behind the Settings dialog.

How it fits together

• Rust is the source of truth. Session state lives in the Tauri process and is pushed to the frontend as patches (treediff → Immer); React renders it rather than owning it — dialogs included.
• One code path, local or remote. Filesystems, terminals and operations sit behind traits with a local implementation and a remote proxy that forwards each call over RPC to the agent. A local session and an SSH session are the same code; only the side of the RPC boundary doing the work differs.
• Everything is a Vfs. S3, SFTP, archives, disc images and search results mount into either side through one trait, and file operations are written once against it — so a copy from an archive on S3, inside a remote session, to the local disk is the ordinary path.

Path	What's there
src/	Frontend: panes, terminal, dialogs, viewer and editor windows
src-tauri/	Tauri backend: windows, session state, command handlers, preferences
libs/newt-common/	Shared core: the traits and both implementations, RPC, VFS backends, operations
libs/newt-agent/	The agent binary for remote, elevated and WSL sessions
libs/newt-archive/, libs/newt-disc/	zip and 7z readers, zip / 7z / tar writers; ISO 9660 and UDF readers
libs/pty-process/	Vendored PTY crate (Unix)
xtask/	Build tasks: agents, TypeScript bindings, third-party notices
packaging/	deb, rpm, Arch, AppImage, macOS and MSI packaging
docs/scenes/	Scripted scenes behind the documentation screenshots

Building

You need Rust, Node.js and, on Linux, the WebKitGTK development packages (libwebkit2gtk-4.1-dev, librsvg2-dev on Debian/Ubuntu).

npm install              # also installs the pre-commit hook
npm run tauri dev        # run the app
npm run tauri build      # release build

Remote, elevated and WSL sessions need agent binaries: cargo xtask agents builds them for every target the host can produce (Linux agents cross-compile from any host with cargo-zigbuild and zig 0.15). Other tasks: cargo xtask gen-bindings regenerates src/lib/bindings.ts after changing a Tauri command or a type it carries, cargo xtask notices regenerates the third-party notices, and npm run screenshots re-renders the documentation screenshots.

CI runs on every push to master:

cargo fmt --all --check && cargo clippy --workspace --all-targets -- -D warnings
cargo test --workspace
npx tsc --noEmit && npm run lint && npm test
cargo xtask gen-bindings --check

The pre-commit hook (also git hook run pre-commit) formats and lints what's staged and runs clippy and the bindings check; the tests are left to you and CI.

Packaging for all three platforms is a manually triggered workflow.

Documentation

• CONTRIBUTING.md — how contributions work here.
• CLAUDE.md — architecture, invariants and footguns; read the relevant part before changing a subsystem. Written for coding agents, equally useful to people.
• FEATURE_DUMP.md — exhaustive reference of what Newt does, from which the user manual is generated.
• TODO.md — known gaps and planned work.

License

Licensed under the GNU GPL v3.0 (GPL-3.0-or-later). Bundled dependencies and assets are credited in THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md (cargo xtask notices), also viewable in-app from the About box.