Z-Explorer (zex)

An extremely fast explorer and disk usage analyzer companion for the Zed ecosystem using the same GPUI renderer framework.

Zex can inherit config, themes, and icon themes from Zed out-of-the-box. It's not a reimplementation of Zed's renderer, it's an identical subset of the source tree, stripped down to just a few MB.

Left: Zed, Right: Zex

Kinda hard to tell which is which, isn't it? Zex prides itself in its first-class integration into Zed's ecosystem.

Installation

On macOS, Linux, and Windows pre-built binaries of Zex can found on the releases page.

Configuration

Zex reads a JSONC config from $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/zex/config.json, falling back to ~/.config/zex/config.json. Every field is optional, and comments/trailing commas are allowed.

The full field reference lives in the CLI

# list every key, grouped by section
$ zex config
# docs, type, and default for one key   
$ zex config theme.mode

Boilerplate configuration

$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/zex/config.json

{
    "inherit_from_zed": true, /* $ zex config inherit_from_zed */ 
    "show_hidden_files": true,
    /* Empty sidebars are not rendered by zex. */ 
    "sidebar": [
        { "name": "Home", "path": "~" },
        "separator",
        {
            "section": "Places",
            "entries": [
                { "name": "Downloads", "path": "~/Downloads" },
                { "name": "Documents", "path": "~/Documents" },
                { "name": "Development", "path": "~/Development" }
            ]
        },
        "separator",
        { "name": "Local Disk", "path": "/" },
        { "name": "Trash", "path": ":trash" } /* :trash is a virtual path */
    ],
    "git": {
        "enabled": true
    }
}

Building from source

Zex requires the recent 2024 rust compiler toolchain.

# Run zexplorer
$ cargo run

# Build optimized release
$ cargo build --profile optimized-release

make install builds the optimized release and installs the binary, .desktop entry, and icon:

$ make build
$ sudo make install               # installs to /usr/local by default
$ sudo make PREFIX=/usr install   # or a custom prefix

Contributions

Contributions are welcome; there's plenty of room to help: new features, bug fixes, performance improvements, or just cleaning up rough edges. Open a PR, we'll take a look.

Commits merged to main should follow Conventional Commits.

License

Apache 2.0. See LICENSE.