shane-farkas/commander

Commander is a small tool that adds a visual file browser to AI coding assistants that live in your terminal, such as Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, and Grok Build. Instead of typing out file paths by hand when you want an assistant to look at certain files, you open a two panel file picker, mark the files you want with the space bar, and send that selection straight into the assistant's conversation, optionally paired with an action like review or explain. The file picker opens in its own separate terminal window rather than inside the assistant's existing window. This is because these AI assistants take full control of their terminal, so any program they launch normally cannot draw a proper full screen interface there. Once you make your selection in the new window, it is sent back to the assistant using a protocol called MCP, which lets external tools plug into AI assistants. Under the hood, Commander is written in Rust and compiles into a single program with two modes: one that runs the actual dual pane picker interface, and one that acts as the background server the assistant talks to. The two communicate through a small file saved to your computer that records your selection. Setup involves building the program once with Rust's package manager and then registering it with whichever assistant you use, since each one has its own slightly different registration steps. Inside the picker, arrow keys or vim style h j k l keys move between panes and files, space marks or unmarks items, and letters like a, r, and e send your selection with different follow up actions attached. The project describes itself as early stage: the core loop of picking files and sending them to the assistant already works well, but planned features like copying, moving, or deleting files directly from the picker are not built yet. It is released under the MIT license.