How to browse FTP in Vifm

Below is a tutorial on how to browse FTP servers in Vifm. It's assumed that some *nix-like operating system with support of FUSE is used. Special files described below have .ftp suffix, but it can be any other extension as well.

Install CurlFtpFS

Install it in whatever way you like the most, which probably depends on your operating system distribution. One can always obtain sources at the official site.

Configure Vifm to handle *.ftp files with CurlFtpFS

Sample command for vifmrc:

" FtpMount
filetype *.ftp
       \ {Mount with CurlFtpFS}
       \ FUSE_MOUNT2|curlftpfs -o ftp_port=-,,disable_eprt %PARAM %DESTINATION_DIR %CLEAR,

Let's enumerate used options of CurlFtpFS:

• ftp_port=1 - make CurlFtpFS pick the same IP address that is already used for the control connection;
• ,, is used to insert , literally as it has special meaning in the argument list of :filetype command (and :filextype);
• disable_eprt - tell CurlFtpFS to disable the use of the EPRT and LPRT commands; it's there just for better connection performance.

See man curlftpfs for other options.

Create *.ftp file

Create a file with .ftp suffix for the server you're willing to connect to. Say, it's name is server-name.ftp and content is like:

-o user=<user-name> <server-address>:

The simplest example might be:

$ cat gnu.ftp
ftp.gnu.org

Connect

In a running instance of Vifm just navigate to the .ftp-file and press l or Enter key.

Alternatively, one can pass path to .ftp-file to Vifm on command-line:

vifm gnu.ftp

which will connect to remote server on Vifm's startup.

Optimization

Remote FTP servers might be slow to respond, that's why it's a good idea to ask Vifm to reduce number of file-system queries in such directories. It can be done with the following option:

set slowfs=curlftpfs

curlftpfs here is type of FUSE file-system as it's seen in mtab. So if you use fsname=NAME option of CurlFtpFS, don't forget to use that NAME in 'slowfs' option.