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.
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Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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