It's interesting to see the "decline" of secondary file managers on Windows and probably Linux systems, too. Back in the days, pretty much any "power user" had their own favorite replacement for the built-in stop gap solution. Quite often one of the commanders, but I've seen other preferences. There was a pretty huge market of shareware (or open source on linux) for this. Next to image viewers probably one of the most common third party tools.
I rarely see that these days, both from regular users and my fellow software developers. Is it because file usage in general has declined? Generally mabye, but not in that target demographic.
Is it because the system apps have gotten better? Maaaybe. I personally wouldn't consider the Win 11 explorer to be that more usable than winfile.exe, but people have different thresholds.
Personally, I'd even make the argument that they've become worse at times and that they're not even in the same niche, i.e. a "file system interface", probably spatial and a more abstracted powerful file manager could and should co-exist.
Hopefully the file selection dialogue then isn't totally unrelated from a UI point of view.
> Is it because file usage in general has declined? Generally mabye, but not in that target demographic.
Absolutely file usage has declined, even among power users.
My god, two decades ago everything was files -- my MP3 collection, all the photos I'd ever taken, everything I'd ever written. My whole life organization was based around organizing files inside of folders.
Now it's all Spotify, Photos, Docs. Everything is search-based rather than folder-based, thank god. A handful of playlists, starred items, a handful of folders for select projects, and that's it.
And then all of the power user stuff, when it comes to coding or otherwise advanced processing of files with data? It's all command-line now, also thank god -- you can do pretty much anything you want, rather than be limited to the feature set of your secondary file manager. The command line was pretty limited in Windows 3.1 and Windows 95. Now we're thankfully in a different era.
> Everything is search-based rather than folder-based, thank god
Huh. At the very least I use both and couldn't live without both. Especially the really nice, super-subjective folder hierarchies that I built myself and know like the back of my hand...whether local or in the cloud. No clutter, no folders with thousands of different loose files.
Search is useful, but image search is vastly inferior to proper organization. Whenever I search for an image using Google or Apple, I never find what I'm looking for. I may find something related to the event, but never the actual photo. The photo might as well be lost.
The sole advantage to search, is that no one properly organizes their photos beyond something like date.
I still use vifm as a filemanager a lot, and couldn't do without it. Bulk renaming of files, moving and categorizing downloaded files (documents, books, music, ...). A lot of stuff that I download gets cleaned up periodically unless it's properly categorized and tucked away. What do you use for that? I do use fzf to search, but it's so much easier with vifm. vifm also makes bulk operations on filenames a breeze with vi keybindings
I switched from Mac OS X to Linux (Debian) a bit more than 15 years ago. At this time on Mac OS X I was barely using the Finder at all, I spent all my time in the Terminal and managed my files from there.
Once on Linux, I didn't even bother to install a file manager at all, I just kept using the terminal. My environment consisted in Openbox as a window manager, rxvt-unicode as a terminal with Bash as a shell, and then mostly Emacs and Firefox (considering only graphical programs).
A few years ago, maybe 2 or 3 I'm not sure, I decided to try to experience Linux the way "muggles" do, because I was always telling people to use it but I actually never properly used what they would if they followed my advice, i.e., Gnome or KDE. So I read a bit, compared the two, and decided to give a try to KDE.
It was a bit of a pain at the beginning, so my first move was to configure everything so that my usual key bindings worked again, but I quickly found that I could be as efficient and at ease as I was before using KDE Apps as they were intended to be used (I even switched from doing my emails in Emacs to using a graphical email client!).
Switching from managing files in the terminal to using Dolphin has been an amazing experience. Dolphin is probably one of my favorite piece of software today. And for things that are better done using a shell, you have a terminal at your fingertips anytime anywhere with all your settings from Konsole (the actual terminal app) thanks to the fantastic KParts framework. It even works transparently with remote mount over ftps thanks to KIO. Truly this is amazing.
It made me love a file manager, which is not something that I would have thought possible a few years back, or the years before that.
Nowadays I'm slowly switching from Emacs to Kate (this is a bit hard and has lead me to become a small KDE contributor to improve Kate and the underlying KTextEditor ^^).
ftps isn't an interesting widely used protocol, its legacy. You probably meant sftp, a subsystem for SSH which got nothing to do with FTP or FTP over SSL (ftps).
Both Konqueror (later Dolphin) and Nautilus have supported mounting remote SSH for ages. Yeah, its nice. On Windows you can do same with Dokan, and on Linux and macOS CLI with Fuse. I mount a USB stick on Linux with CLI, and I mount a remote SSH with CLI. Tiling window manager and endless terminals. Tho its possible to make KDE tiling, too.
For those who like Sublime Text (command palette) and dual pane file manager I can recommend the cross-platform fman.
> There was a pretty huge market of shareware (or open source on linux) for this.
Maybe I'm just _too_ into the linux lifestyle, but as a full time linux user (outside of work where they have me use a macbook), I just use the terminal as my file manager. `ls`, `cp`, `mv`, `rm`, and then a utility installed to have a CLI command for putting things in the trash instead of permanently deleting is pretty much all I need.
>Maybe I'm just _too_ into the linux lifestyle, but as a full time linux user (outside of work where they have me use a macbook), I just use the terminal as my file manager. `ls`, `cp`, `mv`, `rm`, and then a utility installed to have a CLI command for putting things in the trash instead of permanently deleting is pretty much all I need.
I certainly get your point of view. As a long time Unix/Linux user, I find that the standard tools (as you mention) are great, and I use them most of the time.
However, when dealing with large numbers of files/folders and being responsible for their organization/storage, a tool such as MidnightCommander[0][1] can be quite useful.
If that's not your use case and/or other tools work better for you, that's great!
I'd posit that (lack of) prior experience may impact such choices. But IMHO, whatever gets the job done is perfectly fine.
What meaningful file operations do people do day-to-day? I download stuff to my Desktop or Downloads folder and regularly delete it, but that's only when it's not in a package manager. Beyond that, everything's managed by editors/IDEs/web-apps, and code mostly has established hierarchies that don't change too often. Something has to go horribly wrong for me to ever want to do major surgery on files like a deep copy of a directory, especially in the age of git. The last major copy operation I did was moving my Steam library, which Steam did itself.
Back in the day with Midnight Commander and lynx key bindings, it was a nice way to quickly navigate around a codebase and see what's up, but these days I'd probably do that on GitHub. Even before that, my main use of Norton Commander was editing Windows startup files, and creating a parallel cable connection to my brother's PC to play DOOM. I can't remember the last time I opened my file manager tbh.
> What meaningful file operations do people do day-to-day?
Copying stuff out of my Downloads folder, for one. I tried doing that with MacOs' Alfred for a while (select in finder -> shortcut -> fuzzy search destination -> move to), but a decent enough bookmark system in a two-panel folder works better for me.
I also often just dump new documents in a standard location and reorganize it later, as that's more user friendly than your average file requester and postpones one of IT and life's hard problems.
All in all, pretty similar to what I did on my 286. There's a little bit more file search involved (at least on my Mac, less so on Linux) and iTunes/cdrip/beets took a lot of effort out of organizing music.
Sure, I don't need a secondary fm for that, but then again, I don't really need a git client/IDE, either.
Sorry you're not the use case for this. I cut/copy/delete/move files hundreds of times per day, across both local and remote disks. And I use editors, IDEs, and git, too. But the files I cut/copy/delete/move have little or nothing to do with software development.
Among other things I use it for logs: to reach them, to copy them, to find them and to view them. They are just files, not tied to your ide or webapp, and can come from any kind of location.
Keyword search can't replace file navigation. It works like unix way: you must know in advance what to find, but why I would need to find what I already know?
I wonder the same (I've been using 2-panel FMs since late 80s). My guess is that younger devs got more familiar with the command line and some are not even aware they could do file operations even faster and in a more efficient way. Non-devs just rarely use files anymore, everything is being done in a browser or on their mobile devices.
Not sure. I am ok with command line but can not imagine my life without 2 panel FM. TotalCmd on Windows and Double Commander on Linux desktop or Midnight Commander on text mode. In fact Midnight Commander is the first one I install on any fresh Linux.
Sure, more powerful/common command line usage is one reason why the default file managers are sufficient. So in a way, Norton Commander lost while NDOS won.
And of course I can't speak for "old" Mac users (I started in the 00s). Back in the Norton/DOpus days, I didn't know that many, so maybe they always were satisfied with the Finder?
> It's interesting to see the "decline" of secondary file managers on Windows and probably Linux systems, too. Back in the days, pretty much any "power user" had their own favorite replacement for the built-in stop gap solution.
That's because typical everyday workflows became more on-line and less filesystem-centric this way. The proportion of "power user" is also much smaller today, most of the computer users are ordinary people and don't even have a solid understanding of what a file is.
> It's interesting to see the "decline" of secondary file managers on Windows and probably Linux systems
I would credit that with actually functional OS-level search (Mac OSX 10.5, Win7). Why bother sorting stuff hierarchically when you can dump it all in a /Downloads /Movies /Music folder and let search find it for you?
It probably also coincides with the rise of mobile devices where the paradigm is app-based not file-based.
I think because the metaphor went from being file-centric (you choose the file, you launch the app) to app-centric (you open the app, then open the file). It's not exactly applicable to the file manager arena but I guess most users do not need to manage files, they let their apps do it for them.
I started with Norton Commander under MS DOS in 1990-s. I am still using a Far Manager on Windows. It is completely keyboard-based, and I see from the experience that my file operations are 2-3 times more effective then of my peers using system file managers with mouse (or, even worse, touchpad).
I have a years old system of file storage in my home directory, mostly for code: Github, Gitlab, work projects, pet projects etc. Also Downloads folder is there by default. It is much like using a console, but with greater visibility and pre-defined shortcuts for frequent operations.
By far the best file manager for MacOS is Marta [1]. It is the only app that is close to great old Far Manager, which sadly only works properly on Windows (it does have Linux and MacOS ports, but they are quite far from working smoothly on these platforms).
It seems a bit odd to me to credit Total Commander but not a single one of Midnight Commander, Windows Commander, EF Commander, WinNC, PC Commander, SpeedCommander, XCommander, XTree, YTree, ZTree, or the venerable Norton Commander.
It even still uses the same hotkeys as Norton Commander. Still, it supports Total Commander's plugins in case someone is using those, it's LGPL, it looks like a decent example of a useable Free Pascal application to dive into contributing against, it's cross-platform (Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, macOS), and it builds against gtk2, qt4, or qt5. Overall it looks like a nice project. It could probably use a commit in the About page for a first contribution to the project noting a little more history of its lineage.
Windows Commander was the former name of Total Commander. It changed the name in 2002 after Christian Ghisler received a cease-and-desist letter about trademark usage from Microsoft.
Microsoft has been known to be perhaps overzealous in their trademark protection at times, but I think that's a valid complaint. It fills the same niche as Windows Explorer so confusion was quite possible. I always had Total Commander on my BartPE images back in the day.
I loved VC. Its tiny size (less than 100k) made it fit on any floppy disk, even when it was already almost full. It inspired me by showing how powerful our computers are. It was an order of magnitude smaller than NC, if I remember correctly.
Yes, sorry. I meant it to be illustrative of many of them being out there and influencing one another. I'm not sure I could put together a definitive list in the scope of an HN comment. vc was definitely worth mentioning, so thanks for bringing it up.
FreeCommander is my go-to for Windows. Though I'm a Mac user at home, I'm stuck on Windows at work and paid for the 64-bit version of FreeCommander. File Manager seems to be some alien thing, and I still work with lots of files at work.
Gnome commander is OK for me; where does it fit on the family tree? 'tis easier for me to let my eyeballs do the walking than to figure out and type a regex that is going to find just what I want.
Or `brew install double-commander` which grabs a dmg from SourceForge.
You'll have to right-click and Open it in the Finder's Applications folder to get past the fact that it's unsigned, but it seems to work an M1 running MacOS 12.4 (Monterey)
Commanders! The first thing I install on literally any computer I touch. It's like climbing on the top of the hill (or mountain!) and overlooking the dense foliage. I really don't establish a mental connection with the machine until I have a commander running. Doing any disk operations in the Explorer, whatever else drag-and-drop there is, or just plain shell, is just pathetically painful and slow.
Also, shout out to DOS Navigator! I used Norton Commander until 386DX-40, but then switched to the Navigator. Still remember I saw it first time in a shop where I was buying pirated games. The dude in the shop with the long hair was copying files and it looked uber-cool for some reason. I had to ask what was the name of this wonderful utility. He silently showed me the About dialog without turning back. There was no way back to NC from that point on my high-tower Pentium-133.
I guess stuff like Commander never quite got a hold on me because it feels easy to do everything at the shell. What kinds of benefits am I missing out on?
Seconded. I am feeling the enthusiasm of people on this thread and I am really curious - if this could really make me as happy as it makes them I’m totally game, but I just don’t see where it would fit into my workflow. Can some people give more concrete examples of what they use it for?
You only really benefit when you use it a while and know all the key bindings by heart. Most of these seem pretty minor but when you get used to them you totally miss them when you don't have Total Commander available. And it's hard to explain to people, similar to explaining why one uses Dvorak layout or a Tiling WM to someone who has never thought about using those. Some examples:
- selecting files to work with. add, remove to your selection by pattern or manually (e.g. all *.jpg files except the two largest) and work on those
- move files to subdirectories without first creating a subdirectory (it creates it on-the-fly)
- multi-rename tool. select some files, rename them (with auto-incrementing counters, regex, taking substrings of the original name, etc). This is the killer feature for me (e.g. rename files with timestamps like dd-mm-yy-something.jpg to yyyy-mm-dd (SOMETHING).jpg or things like that. Oh and you can use fields from metadata too (id3, exif, ...)
- very fast integrated text/hex viewer with selectable codepages, ansi/ascii switch, and support for images and other multimedia files
- incremental search in file lists
- directory sync. compare and sync different directories by copying files one way or both ways
- everything done via keyboard, no need to move the hands to the mouse and back for anything
- integrated command line, so you can still type something like "cd \\server.domain.local\share$" and instantly have that directory in the tab (you cannot "cd" to an UNC path in cmd.exe)
- opening and working with tar, zip, rar files as if they were regular files. and with plugins you can even open disk images as if they were files
- another nice feature I totally like but which is hard to explain: you copy files simply by pressing f5 and enter. but when you press f5 a second/third time before pressing enter, the textbox selection (for the destination filename/path) switches through the full path, the filename+extension and the filename. So you can easily copy a file and change (overwrite) the filename in the destination just by pressing f5, f5, newnamehere, enter. It keeps the extension and the path you have open in the second window. True, you can do this with tab completion on the command line quite easily too, but you still have to press tab multiple times (depending on the uniqueness of the path maybe a lot more often), and you still have to type the extension by hand
- did I mention plugins? viewer-plugins (I have one that interprets ANSI sequences, for example, for vieweing those cool 90s stype BBS ads), packer plugins (I wrote a lot of these to unpack/access data files from old games), etc.
- for retro enthusiasts: PORT connection (through a parallel LapLink cable or USB data transfer cable) to another PC running Total Commander. No network necessary.
- full text search (ascii, hex, unicode) through all files (or only selected files/directories), including in archive files, with multiple patterns and excludes: alt-f7, ".c;.h|~.",alt-t, "printf" -> search for "printf" in all .c and .h files except those that start with a tilde. After the search you can send the result list to the left/right panel and work with it as if it were a regular directory. i.e. select all files that match "data." and copy them to a different directory (even though the source files are scattered throughout an entire directory tree). Of course you can also seach by metadata (only files/directories/readonly files, timestamps, limited directory depth, file size larger/smaller than X, and with the right plugins by metadata like id3/exif too ...)
Yes, for all these things there are either separate tools that do the same (maybe even better): multi-rename tools exist, opening matroshka-archives (zip in zip in tar in gz) can be done with 7zip, and there are plenty of image viewers out there that offer more features than the integrated viewer. RSync can do synchronization a bit better. but here you have it all in one place
I really found it surprising that so few of the PC based orthodox filemanagers adopted the DOpus style of user-defined buttons and multiple rows thereof at the bottom, instead keeping with the few function key-based operations inherited from a time when there was simple no other option.
(I'm aware of Gentoo and Worker doing that on Linux)
I'm a big fan of two-panel file managers, starting with the ancestor of them all, Norton Commander under DOS. Under Windows, I used Total Commander. I even started developing an NC clone myself with Delphi, but only got as far as an "alpha version". After switching to Linux, I used Krusader for a few years, but then discovered and switched to Double Commander. Since it is developed with Lazarus/FreePascal, maybe I will be able to apply some of the ideas I had for my Delphi NC clone to it (if I can find the time and sympathy from the maintainers)?
This is really "in addition to total commander" as far as I'm concerned. Far is great on the CLI, but when you're not working with terminals you generally want a normal looking application. Both Far and TC are basically "two sides of the same coin", you can use either one, but using both in their respective environments makes life even better.
Yeah, Far actually has pretty good integration with the command line, which is a must for a good file manager - and a file manager is a very natural fit for many CLI workflows.
I used it for quite some time, even bought a license but then dropped it when when they dragged their feet for years with utf8 filename support. I think they never fixed it.
I also recommend Everything. It's the best file searching app I've found for Windows that fits my searching style, just type a regex and give me what I want.
Someone liked it https://developer.run/31 - and expresses preference over Dolphin, which I don't understand because I find that Dolphin does all that but with the benefits of KDE integration.
Neat to see this here, I just started using this app a couple months ago and I like it.
I've been a big fan of alternative file managers for years. I loved LIST back in the DOS days as an alternative to DIR =) where you could easily browse folders, and view files in regular or hex view with a keypress.
After moving to Windows, I wanted something similar and found The V File Viewer (used to be called V, The File Viewer) by Charles Prineas (https://www.fileviewer.com). This has hex view, CSV view, and many other useful features. It can be set up in a dual-paned fashion similar to the *-Commander line of apps, but with its own approach. I used Total Commander for a while too and registered it, but didn't stick with it.
Recently I wanted something similar that I could put on computers at work and share with staff, and found Double Commander and like it a lot. It has its own approach and quirks as well, but I'm getting used to it.
I also like that fact that it's written in Free Pascal and Lazarus. I used to do a lot with Delphi and this has gotten me back into that language with the thought that I might be able to contribute some changes at some point.
Also along those lines, just the other day I learned about CudaText which is a very nice open source programmer's editor similar to SublimeText. It's also written in Free Pascal and Lazarus. I'm happier using this and sharing with staff than I am with Visual Studio Code which comes with too much overbearing MS-ness for my preferences.
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I rarely see that these days, both from regular users and my fellow software developers. Is it because file usage in general has declined? Generally mabye, but not in that target demographic.
Is it because the system apps have gotten better? Maaaybe. I personally wouldn't consider the Win 11 explorer to be that more usable than winfile.exe, but people have different thresholds.
Personally, I'd even make the argument that they've become worse at times and that they're not even in the same niche, i.e. a "file system interface", probably spatial and a more abstracted powerful file manager could and should co-exist. Hopefully the file selection dialogue then isn't totally unrelated from a UI point of view.
Absolutely file usage has declined, even among power users.
My god, two decades ago everything was files -- my MP3 collection, all the photos I'd ever taken, everything I'd ever written. My whole life organization was based around organizing files inside of folders.
Now it's all Spotify, Photos, Docs. Everything is search-based rather than folder-based, thank god. A handful of playlists, starred items, a handful of folders for select projects, and that's it.
And then all of the power user stuff, when it comes to coding or otherwise advanced processing of files with data? It's all command-line now, also thank god -- you can do pretty much anything you want, rather than be limited to the feature set of your secondary file manager. The command line was pretty limited in Windows 3.1 and Windows 95. Now we're thankfully in a different era.
Huh. At the very least I use both and couldn't live without both. Especially the really nice, super-subjective folder hierarchies that I built myself and know like the back of my hand...whether local or in the cloud. No clutter, no folders with thousands of different loose files.
The sole advantage to search, is that no one properly organizes their photos beyond something like date.
Once on Linux, I didn't even bother to install a file manager at all, I just kept using the terminal. My environment consisted in Openbox as a window manager, rxvt-unicode as a terminal with Bash as a shell, and then mostly Emacs and Firefox (considering only graphical programs).
A few years ago, maybe 2 or 3 I'm not sure, I decided to try to experience Linux the way "muggles" do, because I was always telling people to use it but I actually never properly used what they would if they followed my advice, i.e., Gnome or KDE. So I read a bit, compared the two, and decided to give a try to KDE.
It was a bit of a pain at the beginning, so my first move was to configure everything so that my usual key bindings worked again, but I quickly found that I could be as efficient and at ease as I was before using KDE Apps as they were intended to be used (I even switched from doing my emails in Emacs to using a graphical email client!).
Switching from managing files in the terminal to using Dolphin has been an amazing experience. Dolphin is probably one of my favorite piece of software today. And for things that are better done using a shell, you have a terminal at your fingertips anytime anywhere with all your settings from Konsole (the actual terminal app) thanks to the fantastic KParts framework. It even works transparently with remote mount over ftps thanks to KIO. Truly this is amazing.
It made me love a file manager, which is not something that I would have thought possible a few years back, or the years before that.
Nowadays I'm slowly switching from Emacs to Kate (this is a bit hard and has lead me to become a small KDE contributor to improve Kate and the underlying KTextEditor ^^).
Both Konqueror (later Dolphin) and Nautilus have supported mounting remote SSH for ages. Yeah, its nice. On Windows you can do same with Dokan, and on Linux and macOS CLI with Fuse. I mount a USB stick on Linux with CLI, and I mount a remote SSH with CLI. Tiling window manager and endless terminals. Tho its possible to make KDE tiling, too.
For those who like Sublime Text (command palette) and dual pane file manager I can recommend the cross-platform fman.
Maybe I'm just _too_ into the linux lifestyle, but as a full time linux user (outside of work where they have me use a macbook), I just use the terminal as my file manager. `ls`, `cp`, `mv`, `rm`, and then a utility installed to have a CLI command for putting things in the trash instead of permanently deleting is pretty much all I need.
I certainly get your point of view. As a long time Unix/Linux user, I find that the standard tools (as you mention) are great, and I use them most of the time.
However, when dealing with large numbers of files/folders and being responsible for their organization/storage, a tool such as MidnightCommander[0][1] can be quite useful.
If that's not your use case and/or other tools work better for you, that's great!
I'd posit that (lack of) prior experience may impact such choices. But IMHO, whatever gets the job done is perfectly fine.
[0] https://github.com/MidnightCommander
[1] https://midnight-commander.org/
If one day you want to try a graphical file manager, I suggest Dolphin. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32336338 :).
Linux has plenty of file managers. Just like the system that ran the original norton commander had copy/dir/etc.
Where does a "lifestyle" come in here?
Back in the day with Midnight Commander and lynx key bindings, it was a nice way to quickly navigate around a codebase and see what's up, but these days I'd probably do that on GitHub. Even before that, my main use of Norton Commander was editing Windows startup files, and creating a parallel cable connection to my brother's PC to play DOOM. I can't remember the last time I opened my file manager tbh.
Copying stuff out of my Downloads folder, for one. I tried doing that with MacOs' Alfred for a while (select in finder -> shortcut -> fuzzy search destination -> move to), but a decent enough bookmark system in a two-panel folder works better for me.
I also often just dump new documents in a standard location and reorganize it later, as that's more user friendly than your average file requester and postpones one of IT and life's hard problems.
All in all, pretty similar to what I did on my 286. There's a little bit more file search involved (at least on my Mac, less so on Linux) and iTunes/cdrip/beets took a lot of effort out of organizing music.
Sure, I don't need a secondary fm for that, but then again, I don't really need a git client/IDE, either.
It's not quite the two-column file manager; but it's inspired by a file manager + preview, with simple keybindings for navigating.
Keyword search can't replace file navigation. It works like unix way: you must know in advance what to find, but why I would need to find what I already know?
And of course I can't speak for "old" Mac users (I started in the 00s). Back in the Norton/DOpus days, I didn't know that many, so maybe they always were satisfied with the Finder?
That's because typical everyday workflows became more on-line and less filesystem-centric this way. The proportion of "power user" is also much smaller today, most of the computer users are ordinary people and don't even have a solid understanding of what a file is.
I would credit that with actually functional OS-level search (Mac OSX 10.5, Win7). Why bother sorting stuff hierarchically when you can dump it all in a /Downloads /Movies /Music folder and let search find it for you?
It probably also coincides with the rise of mobile devices where the paradigm is app-based not file-based.
I have a years old system of file storage in my home directory, mostly for code: Github, Gitlab, work projects, pet projects etc. Also Downloads folder is there by default. It is much like using a console, but with greater visibility and pre-defined shortcuts for frequent operations.
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[1]: https://marta.sh/
It even still uses the same hotkeys as Norton Commander. Still, it supports Total Commander's plugins in case someone is using those, it's LGPL, it looks like a decent example of a useable Free Pascal application to dive into contributing against, it's cross-platform (Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, macOS), and it builds against gtk2, qt4, or qt5. Overall it looks like a nice project. It could probably use a commit in the About page for a first contribution to the project noting a little more history of its lineage.
Here's some short story about VC: https://web.archive.org/web/20201027035410/http://www.softpa...
https://farmanager.com/index.php?l=en
You'll have to right-click and Open it in the Finder's Applications folder to get past the fact that it's unsigned, but it seems to work an M1 running MacOS 12.4 (Monterey)
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Also, shout out to DOS Navigator! I used Norton Commander until 386DX-40, but then switched to the Navigator. Still remember I saw it first time in a shop where I was buying pirated games. The dude in the shop with the long hair was copying files and it looked uber-cool for some reason. I had to ask what was the name of this wonderful utility. He silently showed me the About dialog without turning back. There was no way back to NC from that point on my high-tower Pentium-133.
- selecting files to work with. add, remove to your selection by pattern or manually (e.g. all *.jpg files except the two largest) and work on those
- move files to subdirectories without first creating a subdirectory (it creates it on-the-fly)
- multi-rename tool. select some files, rename them (with auto-incrementing counters, regex, taking substrings of the original name, etc). This is the killer feature for me (e.g. rename files with timestamps like dd-mm-yy-something.jpg to yyyy-mm-dd (SOMETHING).jpg or things like that. Oh and you can use fields from metadata too (id3, exif, ...)
- very fast integrated text/hex viewer with selectable codepages, ansi/ascii switch, and support for images and other multimedia files
- incremental search in file lists
- directory sync. compare and sync different directories by copying files one way or both ways
- everything done via keyboard, no need to move the hands to the mouse and back for anything
- integrated command line, so you can still type something like "cd \\server.domain.local\share$" and instantly have that directory in the tab (you cannot "cd" to an UNC path in cmd.exe)
- opening and working with tar, zip, rar files as if they were regular files. and with plugins you can even open disk images as if they were files
- another nice feature I totally like but which is hard to explain: you copy files simply by pressing f5 and enter. but when you press f5 a second/third time before pressing enter, the textbox selection (for the destination filename/path) switches through the full path, the filename+extension and the filename. So you can easily copy a file and change (overwrite) the filename in the destination just by pressing f5, f5, newnamehere, enter. It keeps the extension and the path you have open in the second window. True, you can do this with tab completion on the command line quite easily too, but you still have to press tab multiple times (depending on the uniqueness of the path maybe a lot more often), and you still have to type the extension by hand
- did I mention plugins? viewer-plugins (I have one that interprets ANSI sequences, for example, for vieweing those cool 90s stype BBS ads), packer plugins (I wrote a lot of these to unpack/access data files from old games), etc.
- for retro enthusiasts: PORT connection (through a parallel LapLink cable or USB data transfer cable) to another PC running Total Commander. No network necessary.
- full text search (ascii, hex, unicode) through all files (or only selected files/directories), including in archive files, with multiple patterns and excludes: alt-f7, ".c;.h|~.",alt-t, "printf" -> search for "printf" in all .c and .h files except those that start with a tilde. After the search you can send the result list to the left/right panel and work with it as if it were a regular directory. i.e. select all files that match "data." and copy them to a different directory (even though the source files are scattered throughout an entire directory tree). Of course you can also seach by metadata (only files/directories/readonly files, timestamps, limited directory depth, file size larger/smaller than X, and with the right plugins by metadata like id3/exif too ...)
Yes, for all these things there are either separate tools that do the same (maybe even better): multi-rename tools exist, opening matroshka-archives (zip in zip in tar in gz) can be done with 7zip, and there are plenty of image viewers out there that offer more features than the integrated viewer. RSync can do synchronization a bit better. but here you have it all in one place
Screenshot for nostalgia :) -> http://www.abime.net/img/files/applications/DOpus/DOpus4_2.p...
(I'm aware of Gentoo and Worker doing that on Linux)
Really speeds up my everyday work in game development.
I would recommend Far for Windows users. Much more like the original Norton Commander.
https://www.farmanager.com/
https://www.voidtools.com/
I've been a big fan of alternative file managers for years. I loved LIST back in the DOS days as an alternative to DIR =) where you could easily browse folders, and view files in regular or hex view with a keypress.
After moving to Windows, I wanted something similar and found The V File Viewer (used to be called V, The File Viewer) by Charles Prineas (https://www.fileviewer.com). This has hex view, CSV view, and many other useful features. It can be set up in a dual-paned fashion similar to the *-Commander line of apps, but with its own approach. I used Total Commander for a while too and registered it, but didn't stick with it.
Recently I wanted something similar that I could put on computers at work and share with staff, and found Double Commander and like it a lot. It has its own approach and quirks as well, but I'm getting used to it.
I also like that fact that it's written in Free Pascal and Lazarus. I used to do a lot with Delphi and this has gotten me back into that language with the thought that I might be able to contribute some changes at some point.
Also along those lines, just the other day I learned about CudaText which is a very nice open source programmer's editor similar to SublimeText. It's also written in Free Pascal and Lazarus. I'm happier using this and sharing with staff than I am with Visual Studio Code which comes with too much overbearing MS-ness for my preferences.