A terminal file explorer that brings the VS Code sidebar experience to your command line — built with Rust and Ratatui.

• Git status integration — see modified, staged, and untracked files at a glance
• Real-time filesystem watching — tree auto-refreshes on file changes
• Syntax-highlighted preview — preview files with full syntax highlighting (150+ languages)

croot works great alongside cmux for a full vibe coding setup in the terminal — file tree on one side, editor and shell on the other.

brew install realzhangshen/croot/croot

git clone https://github.com/realzhangshen/croot.git
cd croot
cargo build --release
# Binary is at target/release/croot

croot            # Browse current directory
croot ~/projects # Browse a specific directory

Config file: ~/.config/croot/config.toml (or $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/croot/config.toml)

make install-hooks   # Set up pre-commit and pre-push hooks
make ci              # Run all CI checks locally (fmt, check, clippy, test)
make fix             # Auto-format code

The pre-commit hook runs cargo fmt --check (sub-second). The pre-push hook mirrors CI with all four checks. Both are skippable with --no-verify.

MIT