File Operations

XeFM’s core file operations — copy, move, duplicate, and rename — all share the same conflict handling and progress display. This document covers how each one works and the options you can configure.

For the complete list of key bindings, see the XeFM User Guide or press ? in XeFM.

Copy

Copy the selected file(s) to the other pane.

1. Select one or more items (Space to toggle, A to select all files).
2. Press C.
3. Confirm the destination when prompted.

Directories are copied recursively. If a name already exists at the destination, XeFM asks how to resolve it (see Conflict resolution).

XeFM confirms before copying by default. To skip the confirmation:

CONFIRM_COPY = False   # default: True

Move

Move the selected file(s) to the other pane.

1. Select one or more items.
2. Press M.
3. Confirm the destination when prompted.

(With nothing selected, M instead prompts for a new directory name — see Create File Operations.)

XeFM confirms before moving by default:

CONFIRM_MOVE = False   # default: True

Moving between disks and storage types

Move works the same whether the source and destination are on the same disk, on two different disks, or on cloud storage such as Amazon S3.

• Same disk (within one drive, or within one S3 bucket): XeFM uses a fast rename — the move happens instantly with no data copying.
• Different disk (to an external drive, another partition, or a network share): a rename cannot cross a disk, so XeFM copies the file across and then removes the original. This takes as long as a copy does, and it shows the same progress a copy does — a bar per file with the bytes transferred so far.
• Different storage (local → S3, S3 → local, S3 → S3): XeFM copies the file to the destination, verifies the copy, and only then removes the original. Large transfers show progress.

Because the original is removed only after a verified copy, a failed move across disks or storage never deletes your source files. Directory moves work too — all contained files are moved recursively.

For S3 you need AWS credentials configured and the boto3 package installed. Cross-storage transfers depend on your network speed, so test with small files first when setting up a new storage backend.

Duplicate

Make an in-place copy of a file or directory — XeFM’s equivalent of Finder’s Duplicate (⌘D). The copy lands in the same directory as the original, automatically renamed so it never collides.

Select one or more items (or just place the cursor on one), then choose Duplicate from either:

• the File menu in the menu bar, or
• the right-click context menu on a file row.

When nothing is explicitly selected, the entry under the cursor is duplicated; afterward the cursor lands on the new copy.

There is no default keyboard shortcut. To add one, bind the duplicate_files action in your config, e.g.:

KEY_BINDINGS['duplicate_files'] = ['Shift-D']

Copy to Other Pane (C) also duplicates: when both panes show the same directory, copying auto-renames exactly like Duplicate instead of erroring. (Move still refuses a same-directory target.)

Naming

Duplicates use the same ` (N)` scheme as “Keep both” conflict resolution:

The suffix is inserted before the last extension for files and appended for directories and extension-less names.

Duplicating shows a confirmation dialog by default. Turn it off for instant, Finder-like behavior:

CONFIRM_DUPLICATE = False   # default: True

Directories are duplicated recursively, so the confirmation is a useful guard against duplicating a large tree by accident.

Notes and limits

• Read-only archives: you cannot duplicate into a browsed archive.
• Search-results (virtual) panes: Duplicate is unavailable — those results span many directories, so there is no single place to write the copy.
• Large files show byte-level progress and can be cancelled mid-copy.

Conflict resolution

When a copy, move, or archive extraction would overwrite an existing file, XeFM stops and asks what to do instead of silently overwriting. The dialog offers:

• o — Overwrite: replace the existing file with the new one.
• s — Skip: skip this file and continue (copy/move only).
• r — Rename: type a different destination name.
• c — Cancel: abort the whole operation.

Rename

Choosing Rename opens an input field pre-filled with the original name. Edit it to whatever you want and press Enter. If the new name also collides, the dialog reappears so you can overwrite, rename again, or cancel — this repeats until you pick a free name or cancel.

Renaming lets you keep both files (the original and the incoming one) rather than overwriting, which is a safer choice for important files.

Multiple conflicts

When several files collide, XeFM walks through them one at a time. For each conflict you can Overwrite, Rename, or Skip that file — or choose Skip All to skip every remaining conflict at once. Files with no conflict are copied or moved automatically. Each conflict is handled individually; there is no automatic numbering or pattern-based batch renaming (for that, see Batch Rename).

Conflict resolution works across every storage type XeFM supports (local ↔ S3, and so on) and is available whenever the corresponding confirmation setting is enabled:

CONFIRM_COPY = True             # copy conflicts
CONFIRM_MOVE = True             # move conflicts
CONFIRM_EXTRACT_ARCHIVE = True  # extraction conflicts

All three are on by default.

Progress display

Copy and move operations show detailed, real-time progress — especially useful for large files or directories with many files. The UI stays responsive while the transfer runs in the background.

The progress dialog shows one overall bar and, below it, the files currently in flight:

Copy…
[███████████░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░]
12 / 100 items — 350.2M / 2.1G

photos/IMG_2041.jpg                 8.1M / 24.5M
photos/IMG_2042.jpg                12.9M / 31.0M
notes.txt
video/trip.mov                    310.5M / 1.4G

• The overall bar tracks the whole operation by bytes as well as file count, so one huge file among many small ones no longer parks the bar near the end while most of the actual work is still ahead.
• 12 / 100 items counts files that have finished. When several files copy in parallel, starting four files no longer reads as four files done.
• 350.2M / 2.1G — bytes moved so far out of the operation’s total, in human-readable units (B, K, M, G, T).
• One row per file in flight — parallel copies show each worker’s current file with its own byte counts, not just whichever file started most recently. Rows show byte counts only for files large enough to take multiple read/write passes; small files complete too quickly to need them. Long filenames are truncated to fit.

Cancelling

While an operation runs, normal input is blocked so you can’t move the cursor or start another command. Press ESC to cancel. Cancellation is checked between files and, for large files, at each chunk — so it may take a moment to stop at the next checkpoint. Partial files are removed cleanly, leaving nothing half-written behind.

This applies to remote transfers too: a slow upload to S3 or an SFTP server stops when you press ESC, rather than running to completion in the background. A cancelled S3 upload leaves no object behind and no partially uploaded pieces to be billed for; a cancelled download leaves no file on disk. An SFTP transfer stops within about half a second of the keypress.

Progress works across disks and storage types, so a move to an external drive gets the same per-file byte progress that a local copy, a cross-storage transfer, or an S3-to-S3 transfer does. No configuration is required — it is always on and adapts automatically to file size, file count, and terminal width.

Create file operations

• Create directory: create_directory (the same key as move_files, with nothing selected), type a name, and press Enter.
• Create file: create_file, type a filename, and press Enter. The new empty file opens immediately in your configured text editor.

Both check that the current directory is writable and refuse to overwrite an existing name.

Where the cursor ends up

An operation never sends the cursor back to the top of the pane. After a delete, a copy, a move, a duplicate or a rename, the cursor is still on the file it was on — even though rows above it have come or gone, and even on a pane sorted by size or date, or sorted in reverse.

When the file under the cursor is the one that disappeared — you deleted it, moved it out, or deleted a whole block of selected files — the cursor drops to the entry that took its place, so repeating delete_files deletes down through a directory. At the end of the listing it moves up to the new last entry instead, and in a directory you have just emptied it returns to the top.

A rename keeps the cursor on the renamed file under its new name, whether you renamed one file or ran a batch rename over many, and a duplicate leaves the cursor on the new copy. The same holds for changes XeFM did not make itself: a file appearing or vanishing in a directory another program is writing to moves the rows, not your cursor.

The one place the cursor deliberately does return to the top is a filter change (;), which clears the selection and starts the narrowed listing fresh.

See Also

• Batch Rename — rename many files with regex patterns
• Archive — create, extract, and browse archives
• XeFM User Guide — complete documentation