This page lists a few problems which were observed more than once and the best current answer.

Please come to miaou if something isn't clear or if you want to propose a change or addition.

Compilation fails

The common causes are

Those aren't my colors

Broot's initial colors ensure that everything is readable whatever your settings. But you may want to have something more similar to your usual terminal colors, or maybe to define the whole skin.

I have trouble with tmux

The first problem you might see is the presence of artifacts. This may happen in other terminal multiplexers too and it seems related to their bad proxying of some style related codes.

A workaround is to create a skin (for example by uncommenting the one in conf.toml) and to remove all Italic and Bold.

Additionally, if backgrounds can't be properly displayed, you may consider marking selected lines.

Another problem is the fact the br function doesn't set a proper pane name (you'll probably see the name of your shell instead of broot). This may be solved with a modified shell function.

A shortcut isn't available

Most terminals intercept a few keyboard shortcut for their own features. You may need to remap your terminal's default keyboard shortcuts.

I've made a small program which tells you what key combinations are available: print_key.

remap in Windows Terminal

Windows Terminal binds alt+enter to the "toggle fullscreen" command by default. To reclaim alt+enter for Broot, add an 'unbound' entry to the actions array in settings.json:

{"command": "unbound", "keys": "alt+enter"}

remap in iTerm2

For Mac users, iTerm2 must also be configured to enable this shortcut: Go to Preferences->Profiles->Default->Keys and add a mapping that maps ⌥Return↩ to Send Hex Codes: 0x1b 0x0d. This can be done by clicking the + sign at the bottom to add a mapping, clicking the "Click to Set" area, pressing the desired key combination (⌥Enter a.k.a ⌥Return), choosing the "Send Hex Code" option from the drop-down menu and inserting the following string there: "0x1b 0x0d".

Note that this will change the behavior of alt+enter for all terminal windows, and it will no longer send the return sequence.

remap in Broot

If a shortcut isn't available for broot and you can't or don't want to remap the one of your terminal, the solution is to change the shortcut in broot.

Slow remote disk

Broot dives into all visible directories to look for the best matches. This can be a problem if you mount a remote disk. The solution is to tell broot not to automatically enter the directory. It will still be entered if you focus it yourself.

Open files without xdg-open (or equivalent)

In such a case, which isn't rare in server systems, you can rebind enter to the program of your choice.

Everything feels slow

It's probably your terminal app's fault. You could check that by using any other TUI application.

Most terminal apps are fine but some, made with Electron or worse, or crippled with fancy plugins, take dozens of milliseconds to redraw the screen. You should not use those terminals.

Broot doesn't work on msysgit or git bash

I have no solution for that. If you know how to tackle the problem, the maintainers of Crossterm would be interested too.

Windows 9-

Even Microsoft doesn't support versions of Windows before the 10. If you have a cheap solution it's welcome but I don't have any.

PowerShell Encoding

Some problems in PowerShell are linked to a wrong encoding. You should set it to UTF-8 in your profile.

This will create a profile if it doesn't exist:

if (!(Test-Path -Path $PROFILE)) {
  New-Item -ItemType File -Path $PROFILE -Force
}

notepad $PROFILE will open the profile config.

Add this line:

[Console]::OutputEncoding = [System.Text.Encoding]::UTF8

Run the following with admin privilege (source):

Set-ExecutionPolicy -ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned -Scope CurrentUser
Unblock-File -Path $PROFILE

This will ensure your profile is loaded in new terminals/sessions. You can check it by opening a new terminal then running [Console]::Out. The output should show an encoding of System.Text.UTF8Encoding.

Broot doesn't seem as fast or feature complete on Windows

It isn't. I'm not a Windows programmer and I don't even have a machine to test. I'd welcome the help of a programmer with the relevant competences and the will to improve broot.