Optional tools

How optional integration works

Zari starts and remains usable without any tool on this page. Executables are detected through PATH and launched with argument vectors rather than shell command strings. If a tool is missing or fails, Zari falls back to its native preview or reports a concise message.

Supported now

• Nerd Fonts — optional file icons; set ui.nerd_fonts = true
• fd — accelerates recursive filename search and fzf subtree collection; native traversal remains the fallback
• rg / ripgrep — powers S content search
• fzf — interactive subtree selection with z
• zoxide with fzf — historical directory selection with Z
• wl-clipboard, xclip, or xsel — copies selected paths to the Linux system clipboard with cp
• jq — formatted JSON previews
• poppler / pdftotext — text previews for the first PDF pages
• 7-Zip / 7z — archive listing previews
• FFmpeg / ffprobe — video and audio stream metadata
• ImageMagick / magick — metadata for images, fonts, HEIC, and JPEG XL files
• resvg — detected for SVG-capable environments; pixel display still needs a terminal image protocol

Nerd Font icons

Install a Nerd Font, configure the terminal to use it, then enable the option below. Plain fallback icons remain the default so Zari never requires a patched font.

[ui]
show_file_icons = true
nerd_fonts = true

Image and video limits

Zari can show FFmpeg and ImageMagick metadata today. Actual image and video thumbnails require a supported terminal image protocol in addition to resvg, ImageMagick, or FFmpeg; ncurses alone cannot draw those pixels. Pixel rendering remains tracked integration work and is not advertised as active in version 0.1.1.

Common package names

# Arch Linux
sudo pacman -S --needed nerd-fonts ffmpeg 7zip jq poppler fd ripgrep fzf zoxide resvg imagemagick wl-clipboard

# Names vary on other distributions. Choose one Linux clipboard helper:
# wl-clipboard (Wayland), xclip, or xsel (X11).