Meridian Commander

The meridian is noon — the other end of the clock from midnight.

A two-pane terminal file manager with the keys of Midnight Commander and the face of Turbo Vision, written in pure Python. It browses local and networked locations (SFTP/SSH/FTP), copies and moves files between the two panes regardless of where each side lives, synchronizes directories so both panes hold the newest version of every file, and ships with a built-in file viewer and editor — plus browsers for .xlsx grids, .docx documents, .pptx slides, rendered Markdown, colour images, PDFs, and zip/tar archives navigable as directories.

The main screen: two panes in Turbo Vision colours

Quick start

pip install "meridian-commander[ssh]"
meridian

With no arguments the left pane opens in the current directory and the right pane in your home directory. Press F1 for help, F2 to connect a pane to a remote location, Tab to switch panes, and F10 to quit.

This manual

  • Installation — the extras, pipx, and what to do when meridian is “command not found”.

  • Usage — the complete guide: connecting to a remote location, presets, the archive and document browsers, images, PDFs, and the full key-binding reference.

  • Look and feel — the colour schemes and what happens on a terminal without them.

  • Configuration — config.ini and where it lives.

  • Plug-ins — what ships, and how to write one.

  • Data tools tutorial — a walkthrough of profiling, cleaning and building a dataset.

  • How copying and synchronizing work — the second channel, and what the sync planner decides.

  • Development — the architecture, and what CI checks.

  • Plug-in API reference — PluginContext, PanePlugin and InputOutputPlugin.

Elsewhere