Last Updated on March 8, 2026
transgender is a minimalistic TUI file explorer with minimal dependencies, written by a Ranger hater.
In the developer’s opinion, transgender is simpler than Ranger. Creeping featurism and growing size have made Ranger less attractive. Additionally, the developer believes Ranger is badly designed which irritates its users.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- File exploration.
- Changing directories.
- Searching by file name. The software supports searching by regular expressions. It performs a search whenever a key is pressed in search mode. Due to the use of the regex-lite crate, the executable can be a bit bloated ( ~504KB). If you don’t need the regular expression feature, there’s a vanilla branch of the code.
- Opening files with a preferred editor.
- Multiple themes. The default theme is lucius. There’s also a dark theme, trans, acme, sakura, and vscode.
- Vim bindings.
- Cross-platform support – runs under Linux and macOS.
Website: github.com/Sberm/Transgender.rs
Support:
Developer: Howard Chu
License: BSD 2-Clause “Simplified” License
transgender is written in Rust. Learn Rust with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| TUI File Explorers | Language | License |
|---|---|---|
| NERDTree | VimL | WTFPL License |
| xplr | Rust | MIT License |
| nvim-tree | Lua | GNU General Public License v3.0 |
| Treemacs | Emacs Lisp | GNU General Public License v3.0 |
| browsr | Python | MIT License |
| termscp | Rust | MIT License |
| vim-fern | VimL | MIT License |
| tere | Rust | European Union Public License 1.2 |
| CHADTree | Python | GNU General Public License v3.0 |
| FileSSH | Rust | MIT License |
| Rust-Traverse | Rust | MIT License |
| fex | Zig | GNU General Public License v3.0 |
| transgender | Rust | BSD 2-Clause “Simplified” License |
| rovr | Python | MIT License |
| StygianSift | Rust | GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 |
| Fortress | Fortran | MIT License |
| runa | Rust | MIT License |
| sdn | C++ | 0BSD License |
| twf | Go | Developer did not reply to license info request |
| kupo | Python | Developer did not reply to license info request |
| Hop | Python | MIT License |
| FTB | C++ | MIT License |
| faint | Shell | GNU General Public License v2.0 |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
 Explore our comprehensive directory of recommended free and open source software. Our carefully curated collection spans every major software category.This directory is part of our ongoing series of informative articles for Linux enthusiasts. It features hundreds of detailed reviews, along with open source alternatives to proprietary solutions from major corporations such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. You’ll also find interesting projects to try, hardware coverage, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. Discovered a useful open source Linux program that we haven’t covered yet? Let us know by completing this form. |