This series shines a spotlight on open source developers who make a real difference. Too often, their contributions go unrecognised. By highlighting their achievements, this series aims to give these talented developers the recognition they deserve and to celebrate the dedication, creativity, and passion that drive the open source community forward.
Arun Prakash Jana, better known on GitHub as jarun, represents a strain of open source development that feels increasingly rare: software built not to impress a venture-funded roadmap, but to remove friction from everyday computing. His GitHub profile describes his mission plainly: he writes terminal utilities, often with GUI integration, for efficient workflows, and says he created them to “minimize time at a computer.” That philosophy is visible across his body of work and explains why his projects have attracted a loyal following. His profile currently shows he has around 2.6k followers. His set of pinned projects are led by nnn, buku, ddgr, bcal, spy, and imgp.
The centerpiece of his open source contribution is nnn, a terminal file manager. It is not presented as a nostalgic toy for command-line purists; it is described as a full-featured, unorthodox, nearly zero-config, very fast file manager designed to stay “out of your way.” Its feature set goes well beyond basic navigation: disk usage analysis, batch rename, application launching, file picking, plugin support, live previews, and a patch framework for user-submitted modifications. That combination matters because it shows Jana’s main contribution is not just writing code, but designing a complete workflow environment for people who live in the terminal.
Luke wrote a review of nnn back in 2020 explaining why it’s an awesome piece of open source software. In our roundup of the finest graphical and console based file managers, nnn ranks as the finest open source console-based file manager.
But Jana’s work is broader than nnn. buku tackles bookmark management from the command line and frames itself as a “personal textual mini-web,” with browser import and optional web front-end support through bukuserver. ddgr brings DuckDuckGo search to the terminal and featured in our 100 Great and Must-Have CLI Linux Applications, while googler did the same for Google before Jana archived it in March 2022.
We’ve also reviewed imgp, a Python-based command-line tool that lets you resize and rotate JPEG and PNG files. The software can resize (or thumbnail) thousands of images with a single command. The software is a standalone utility, it’s not tied to a file manager or other software. He’s also authored bcal which serves users who regularly work with bits, bytes, SI/IEC conversion, and storage calculations. Taken together, these projects show a consistent pattern: Jana repeatedly identifies small but recurring annoyances in technical workflows and turns them into compact, well-scoped tools.
My view is that Jana’s real importance lies in his discipline. He does not appear to chase fashionable abstractions or overbuild for the sake of attention. Instead, his projects are opinionated, practical, and unapologetically tuned for users who value speed, keyboard-driven control, and composability. Even when that style can seem austere, it gives his software a clarity many larger open source projects lack. Arun’s contribution is not a single viral repository; it’s a coherent body of work that argues the terminal can still be a first-class place for serious, polished computing. In an era of bloated software, that is a meaningful open source legacy.