yazi: A Terminal File Manager That Shows You Images

Jesse L

7 min read

·

Sep 7, 2026

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Hi everyone, welcome back. Today, I will be going over yazi — a fast terminal file manager written in Rust that previews images, videos, PDFs, and archives without leaving your terminal.

The project lives here: github.com/sxyazi/yazi

I downloaded and ran it while writing this. The current release is v26.9.1.

I’ll write this for someone comfortable in a terminal who has never used a file manager in one.

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The Problem

Navigating the filesystem from a shell is fine when you know exactly where you’re going:

cd ~/projects/api/src/handlers

It’s miserable when you’re looking for something:

ls
cd src
ls
cd ..
ls -la
cd assets
ls
# which of these images is the right one?

You’re building a mental picture of a directory tree one ls at a time, holding it in your head, and constantly moving up and down to check where you are.

And there’s a category of file you simply can’t inspect. You find header-v2-final.png and to know what it is you have to leave the terminal entirely — open a file browser, or scp it somewhere, or launch an image viewer.