Can’t imagine using my system without this.
it gained 14k+ stars on github in a year (development started in 2023 july).
isn’t it a bit suspicious?
maybe it’s nothing, but this just caught my eye
👋🏻 Hi, Yazi author here, thanks for your interest in it!
I created an account to answer this question, for me, getting 15k stars is totally not surprising and should be quite expected since I’ve been working hard to manage the Yazi community. Let me try my best to explain where these stars are coming from and why:
- Yazi is undergoing very active development, there’s a cool graph on GitHub that reflects the activity of the project, https://github.com/sxyazi/yazi/graphs/contributors
- I put a lot of effort into writing release notes to showcase the latest features to users, presenting this information in the best way possible - you can see these at Yazi Releases.
- Yazi is a Rust app, and many people are interested in Rust, which already has a lot of excellent projects (like
ripgrep,bat,fd,exa,starship, etc.), so Yazi benefits from this good reputation — especially since it genuinely delivers on its promises in README: fast, efficient, user-friendly, and customizable. - Yazi is a versatile file manager that, unlike
broot, leans more towards fast file navigation rather than file management. I explained the differences in this Reddit comment. - Yazi integrates well with other tools (like Neovim and Helix), which will attract users from those platforms:
- Neovim plugins like https://github.com/mikavilpas/yazi.nvim
- Helix + Zellij integration https://yazi-rs.github.io/docs/tips#helix-with-zellij
- Yazi has a great plugin ecosystem — you can check out all the community plugins at https://yazi-rs.github.io/docs/resources and https://github.com/AnirudhG07/awesome-yazi
- I post about each major release on Reddit, which usually gets a lot of attention, making it one of the main sources of these stars, like this one and this one.
- Yazi occasionally appears in tech blogs or videos, such as this one, this one, this one, this one, and this one, which also brings in a lot of stars.
- Some Yazi users share it on other platforms, like Hacker News here and Lemmy like this post (hey! TIL about this platform, it’s awesome!).
- I promote it occasionally on my personal Twitter, which usually brings good attention, like this tweet and this one.
- Yazi often appears on GitHub Trending, where a lot of people look, which can also lead to some stars, such as this one - 🥇 Yazi reached number one on the Rust category. It tends to trend due to new releases or someone making a new introduction video about Yazi.
- Yazi has a strong Discord community — our official Discord server has 800+ members, and many users enjoy sharing the tools they use in other servers, with Yazi being one of them. This also contributes to getting some stars. I’ve joined a lot of Discord servers and occasionally see people sharing about Yazi.
- Once I have time, I’ll exchange my thoughts with users and potential users, just like I’m doing now - good communication is key to everything!
I hope this helps address your confusion or concerns. I’ve been doing my best to improve Yazi - I’ve spent almost all my free time maintaining it. These stars feel like recognition and appreciation for my efforts, so it feels pretty natural to me ;)
Starhacking is a thing. When you see words like “blazing fast” & emoji all over the README it show the maker is treating the code as marketing—& MS GitHub is a social media platform with algorithms.
That’s because it works very well, and the main developer is super active (I’ve contributed and made some plugins so have interacted with them a fair bit)
I doubt that amount of stars can be achieved naturally in this short time, especially from a developer previously unknown.
the program is certainly not used by likehappy common people, this would seem complicated and scare them awayTo be fair this is a terminal file manager… only a certain kind of person will be interested in the first place, and those people are likely to be more inclined to leave a star on GitHub.
Personally I believe the stars were achieved naturally but of course there’s no way to know and it never hurts to be skeptical.
To be fair this is a terminal file manager… only a certain kind of person will be interested in the first place,
that’s the point
and those people are likely to be more inclined to leave a star on GitHub.
I don’t see that connection. But you know what, here is an example.
Broot is a similar program. It has been there for longer, has been loved by many, yet it has fewer stars.
If I would know more of those like this, I would probably have more examples.Realised I never responded to this - I’ll hold the L on that reasoning, didn’t think that through. I grant that you may be right about the stars, but I’m still doubtful due to my anecdotal experience of seeing a lot of activity around the repo + discord server from 4k stars to over 10k (while I was following it semi-closely). Entirely possible though, of course.
As a current user of ranger could this be a full replacement?
Switched from ranger to yazi months ago. There’s some UI choices that I miss but the configuration via toml and lua plugins is way better than rangers.
I would like to find a git modeline plugin. Its wild to me that they have a zoxide integrated and keybound by default but no git integration.
Git integration support was added three weeks ago in 0.3.3 ^^
You still have to install it manually, but it will be a default plugin in an upcoming release.
Yes. I switched to yazi from ranger. File previews is so much better. Image previews dont hog up ram or crash your manager. It has everything and more like opening encrypted archives, plugin support, themes. I use 2 plugins, one to compress files and the other to display present directory size.
It’s not just the features but the app itself is magnificent. I have never seen such a goid looking tui app.
Same, ranger was painfully slow at times. For some reason it would take multiple seconds to start on a few machines I connected it to.
I binned my copies of ranger and nnn when I found this last year. Its stellar.
Diskonaut is the only other one that stuck, of the new CLI file managers. hunting lost files from a recovered hard drive was a lot easier with directory visualization for whatever reason.
What are your primary use cases for Yazi? I’m trying to see if it’ll fit into my workflow.
I’ve been experimenting with it on my MacBook Pro. When I navigate to a few Go projects I’m working on, syntax highlighting only seems to be available in the file preview. After that, it appears to just open in plain Vi.
At work, I use Windows and primarily code in C#.
Is Yazi more geared towards file management?
It hooks into nearly every base utility I can’t live without (fzf, jq, helix, ripgrep). If you’re on windows im not sure you’re going to get a ton unless you live in WSL.
You can pick the editor it’ll open by default, which should be configurable with comparable syntax highlighting. Vi can pretty much look like whatever. I think it’ll default to vscode on windows.
Im not sure what you’d use it for but manage files, but I would have poked it and probably moved along while I was still on windows.
Edit: the other benefit you might not see has a lot to do with support of mime types.
https://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/media-types.xhtml
The xdg open protocol will open whatever app is assigned to handle type locally. Which is probably why it defaults to editor.
Most frequently I use it as an interactive
cd. Docs on howSaves me a whole lot of
lsandcdor tabbing through completions.
