• General considerations
• Icons
• Keybindings
• Image previews
• FZF
• Warning prompt
• Recursive search
• Backslashes
• Color support
• Colors on Alacritty
• Bulk rename/remove

Issues may steam from different sources: a configuration conflict, your environment, or, finally, clifm itself.

1. Configuration

If you ever run into issues, it is recommended to run in stealth mode (clifm -S), so that clifm runs with default values skipping all configuration files. If the issue is gone, you most likely have a configuration problem. In this case (once running again in normal mode), you can run config dump to list settings and their current values, highlighting those differing from default values.

Instead of running in stealth mode, you can also run under a new profile (for example, clifm -P testing), regenerating thus all configuration files.

As a last resource, you can also generate a fresh config file via the config reset command (a backup of the old config file is created, in case you want to revert changes).

2. Environment

Your system environment can be sometimes a source of issues. To make sure your current issue is not related to your environment, run clifm in secure environment mode (clifm --secure-env-full). If the issue is gone, you need to troubleshot your environment.

3. Give us a call

If the issue persists, you can always open a new issue.

You most likely need to install an emoji fonts package. See the icons section.

Consult the keybindings section.

Issues are normally caused by some missing dependency. Consult the image previews section and the description page of the fzfnav-BFG plugin.

Consult the TAB completion page.

If using a Readline version prior to 7.0¹ you might experience some glitches in the warning prompt.² As of now, there are three possible workarounds:

1. Remove the color codes from the WarningPrompt field, either in your prompts file (via prompt edit) or in the color scheme file (via cs edit) as follows:

#WarningPrompt="\[\e[00;02;31m\](!) > "
WarningPrompt="(!) > "

2. Disable the warning prompt by setting EnableWarningPrompt to false (or running with --no-warning-prompt). See this prompts file specifically designed for this purpose.

3. Install a newer version of the library (7.0 or newer is recommended).

For example, Solaris 10 ships readline-4.2, and Openindiana Hipster 2023.05 ships readline-6.3. To install readline-7.0 on any of these platforms follows these instructions:

a. Install the library:

pkgadd -d http://get.opencsw.org/now
/opt/csw/bin/pkgutil -U
/opt/csw/bin/pkgutil -y -i libreadline7
/usr/sbin/pkgchk -L CSWlibreadline7 # list files

b. Link the .so file to the corresponding libraries directory: ln -s /opt/csw/lib/amd64/libreadline.so.7 /usr/lib/64/libreadline.so.7

c. Compile against this library: gcc -o clifm *.c /usr/lib/64/libreadline.so.7 -ltermcap -lmagic -lnvpair ...

¹ As of 2023, version 7.0 was released almost 7 years ago (September, 2016).
² These glitches, caused by the rl_redisplay function, have been solved upstream in 7.0. See https://lwn.net/Articles/700983/

Refer to this issue.

Some terminals, like xonsh and nushell, do not recognize backslashes as a escaping mechanism (which is clifm's default). Refer to this issue for a workaround.

If clifm fails to recognize your terminal, it will run without colors. Try setting $TERM to some know value. Example:

TERM=xterm-256color clifm

For more information consult the colors section.

If using a 256-colors or 24-bit color scheme, dimming doesn't work. For example: 2;38;5;140 produces the same color as 0;38;5;140. Sadly, there's nothing we can do here except preventing you from using dimmed colors, since this is an Alacritty design decision. See https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/5733.

When renaming/removing files in bulk (via the br or rr commands respectively), clifm attempts to open a temporary text file (with the list of files to be renamed/removed) via Lira, our built-in files opener. In case no opening application was found, the operation fails. In this case, try specifying the opening application yourself using the :EDITOR parameter. For example:

br *.pdf :nano

In this way you instruct clifm to open the temporary file with nano.