a pleasant file explorer in your terminal supporting all filesystems

browsr 🗂️ is a pleasant file explorer in your terminal. It's a command line TUI (text-based user interface) application that empowers you to browse the contents of local and remote filesystems with your keyboard or mouse.

You can quickly navigate through directories and peek at files whether they're hosted locally, in GitHub, over SSH, in AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage, or Azure Blob Storage. View code files with syntax highlighting, format JSON files, render images, convert data files to navigable datatables, and more.

Screenshots

Screen Recording

browsr.mp4

Installation

Install browsr in an isolated environment with uv:

uv tool install browsr

You can also use pipx (pipx install browsr) or pip install browsr.

Extra Installation

If you're looking to use browsr on remote file systems, like GitHub or AWS S3, you'll need to install the remote extra. If you'd like to browse parquet / feather files, you'll need to install the data extra. Or, even simpler, you can install the all extra to get all the extras.

uv tool install "browsr[all]"

Upgrading

uv tool upgrade browsr

To upgrade all tools installed with uv, use uv tool upgrade --all.

Usage

Simply give browsr a path to a local or remote file / directory. Check out the Documentation for more information about the file systems supported.

Local

browsr ~/Downloads/

SQLite

Open a .db, .db3, .sqlite, or .sqlite3 file to browse its tables and views without modifying the database. Select an object from the dropdown to browse its rows. Use Previous and Next (or { and }) to page through rows. The --max-lines option controls the number of rows per page (default: 1000).

Use [ and ] to switch to the previous or next table or view. Navigation wraps at either end of the dropdown and starts each selected object at its first page. These shortcuts are also listed under ?.

Columns are limited to 40 terminal cells, with long values shortened using an ellipsis. Press c to copy the selected cell's full value as plain text, preserving line breaks. NULL copies as NULL, and BLOBs copy as full hexadecimal contents. Press Shift+C to copy the selected row's full contents as JSON, including original column names and unshortened values. In copied rows, NULL becomes JSON null, and BLOBs become {"type": "blob", "hex": "..."}. All SQLite navigation and copy shortcuts appear in ? while viewing a SQLite file, including when the file tree has focus.

browsr ~/data/example.sqlite

Remote databases are downloaded to a temporary file that is removed when you switch files or exit. The usual --max-file-size limit applies. Remote previews read the database file alone; checkpoint any WAL changes before uploading it.

GitHub

browsr github://juftin:browsr

export GITHUB_TOKEN="ghp_1234567890"
browsr github://juftin:browsr-private@main

Cloud

browsr s3://my-bucket

** Currently AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage, and Azure Blob Storage / Data Lake are supported.

SSH / SFTP

browsr ssh://username@example.com:22

License

browsr is distributed under the terms of the MIT license.