Vifm Q&A - Recent questions without answers

Open vifm with multiple tabs

Tue, 28 Oct 2025 14:59:51 +0000

Hi,

In case anyone wants to open a specified set of tabs when opening vifm but doesn't want to duplicate them when reloading

" Open vifm with three tabs per pane. The first tab of each pane is in current
" directory. Remaining are home directory.
"-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
if tabpagenr("$") == 1
    windo tabnew
    cd ~ ~
    windo tabnew
    cd ~ ~
    tabnext 1
    winc w
    tabnext 1
    winc w
endif

Sync tabs (like :sync for panes)

Tue, 28 Oct 2025 14:45:38 +0000

Hi,

I added commands to my $MYVIFMRC that can synchronize the view of the next tab to the current pane's directory or directory under the current cursor. Just posting it here in case it's useful for anyone else and in case anyone wants to suggest another alternative.

" Sync next tab to current directory
command! TabSync : let $DIR_CUR = "%d"
                \| tabnext
                \| cd "$DIR_CUR"
                \| tabprev
nnoremap <a-u> :TabSync<cr>
" Sync next tab to directory under cursor
command! TabSyncCursor : let $DIR_CUR = "%c"
                      \| tabnext
                      \| cd "$DIR_CUR"
                      \| tabprev
nnoremap <a-p> :TabSyncCursor<cr>

I use it in combination with other sync keymaps like below:

" Sync other pane to current directory
nnoremap <a-i> :sync<cr>
" Sync other pane to directory under cursor
nnoremap <a-o> :sync %c<cr>

Show a status bar message when opening specific file extension

Thu, 19 Sep 2024 16:33:07 +0000

I'm trying to setup a filetype option but I'm missing something on this:

filetype {*.gif},<image/*> echo "text to display"

because it's printed on the shell and not on the vifm status bar, already tried with :echo to no avail

edit:
I'm trying to make this work

%S Show command output in the status bar.

edit2: solved

filetype {*.gif},<image/*> echo "text to display" %S

Problem with fzf directory sorting in vifm

Tue, 20 Sep 2022 19:38:16 +0000

Hi, i asked the following question:

Fzf cd & goto in one command?
https://q2a.vifm.info/784/fzf-cd-goto-in-one-command?show=784#q784

and everything was working great, thanks again !!

My issue is that if i want to change into my Downloads directory, fzf will first list all the files with downloads in their filename

This was not the case before. There might have been an update to fzf, that has changed the behavior of the commands.

I thought i would ask the question here, as maybe someone else has had the same issue?

Thanks in advance

Extract archive with key

Thu, 31 Mar 2022 09:26:47 +0000

Hello, I just wanted to share this easy way to extract archives from within vifm. Maybe there's a better way but it works quite well. It requires dtrx.

" Extract an archive
command! extract dtrx -n %c %i
nnoremap x :extract<cr>:echo expand('%"c') ": archive extracted"<cr>

And thank you for this amazing programme!

:grep to not ignore links ?

Tue, 27 Oct 2020 18:00:06 +0000

Just realized that :grep command excludes files that are actually links from search.
(How) is it possible to make it go in these too??

Looking through the docs found 2 seemingly relevant settings, at least those have something to do with links :)

chaselinks
followlinks

tried both with no success, please advise

vifm Version: 0.10.1

My second thought: that may be defined with grepprg

UPD:
... and yes, indeed mine was set to ripgrep which ignores symlinks by default

Please feel free to ignore my question

Vifm + Ueberzug

Wed, 29 May 2019 18:08:57 +0000

Hi all, i recently found that its possible to make vifm show preview of currently pointed file with Ueberzug

So i installed it, tried this approach and it didn't work in a way that vifm does now show any images. Firstly i created .scripts/ folder in home directory, added it to $PATH, then throwed vifmimg and vifmrun in it. No luck

Then i downloaded scripts from DistroTube repository (after watching this video) and again -- no success in making previews work.

P.S I tried moving vifmimg and vifmrun to .config/vifm/scripts/ both together and separately

Permission for Autofs'd usb drives and sd cards

Sat, 06 Apr 2019 14:38:34 +0000

I'm using autofs to mount USB drives and SD cards when entering their specified directories (they're FAT formatted, in case that's relevant). When I copy files to the drives, vifm complains: "Error while putting. [path to file]: Failed to setup file permissions". I can choose [i] to ignore this, and the file will be copied just fine.

The reason I think this is a vifm issue is because copying files onto the drive in the command line produces no errors and works ok.

So the nag is irritating but can be [i]gnored, and when copying a number files inside the same directory it's not a real problem. However, when trying to copy a directory with subdirectories, only one subdirectory inside the directory will be copied. This means that much/most of any directory structure you want to copy onto a removable drive has to be done one directory at a time, all the while manually [i]gnoring the nag messages every time.

Is there a way around this?

Bash shows the last command as the first line in the editor

Thu, 14 Feb 2019 13:48:20 +0000

Vifm Version: 0.10
Git info: built out of repository

Debian testing.

In Vifm, open the shell.
Press Ctrl-X, Ctrl-E to edit the command in Vim.

Earlier, the first line in the editor was blank; the last command executed was the second line.
After a change in Bash (Debian testing), the last command executed is the first line.

How do I revert the change?