Searching for a good file manager

aardwolf · 2009-04-25 12:42:10

I'm searching for a good file manager. Konqueror 3.5 is quite good, dolphin 4.1 and konqueror 4.1 are not. Since konqueror 3.5 is going to die due to lack of support in the future, I kind of need to find a new good file manager...

Do there exist file managers with the following features?

Many of these features are things I thought were quite logical to be in a file manager, but seem to be missing in most "modern" ones...

-independent of any desktop (gnome or KDE), just a standalone program
-preferably not being both a web browser and file manager in once, at least not in an annoying way. Konqueror 3.5 shows that being that combination is possible without being annoying.
-ability to have a tree view of the folders on one side and list view showing the files and subfolders of the folder currently selected in the tree on the other side
-detailed list view showing at least filename, type, date and size, and the ability to sort according to any of these properties
-a non-detailed view showing image contents would also be nice, to browse folders of photos or other images
-ability to open files in certain programs if you doubleclick the file, NOT open it by singleclicking, singleclicking may only select it
-ability to select multiple files by dragging box around files or using keys like "ctrl" and "shift"
-ability to do "open terminal here" or type terminal commands in the current open directory
-must have ability to drag files from one folder to another, from list view to tree view and vica versa, to move or copy them
-and must have ability to use "ctrl+c" and "ctrl+v" to copy files and foldes from here to there
-multiple tabs is a huge plus
-favorites (to local folder paths) is also a huge plus
-preview of files when hovering the mouse over them is nice
-must have ability to zip and unzip (or other compression formats) folders by just right clicking them and choosing a zip/unzip command there
-in addition to that, must also have ability to browse through a zip file as you would through a normal directory, and drag files from the insides of the zip file to the tree view to automatically unzip those files there, and of course "ctrl+c"/"ctrl+v" should also work to copy a file from the inside of the zip file, to some other folder on your disk
-no horizontal autoscrolling in the tree view, that is an invention straight from the abyss...

Allan · 2009-04-25 12:46:30

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Com … e_Managers

aardwolf · 2009-04-25 13:18:12

Hmm, PCMan and Xfe of this list look like possibly good candidates, I'll try those.

Wilco · 2009-04-25 15:01:20

Thunar and xfe are quite nice

Arkane · 2009-04-25 15:12:18

ROX's Shell Command function, which allows you to run a command on selected files, is really nice, but many other aspects of ROX unfortunately don't really correspond to your other criteria.

(If you ask me, this means you should change these criteria )

der_joachim · 2009-04-25 17:10:57

+1 for PCManFM.

It is light, bloody fast and it has most if not all the features you desire.

Isengrin · 2009-04-25 17:45:56

+1 for PCManFM
The only thing I miss are video thumbnails. Plus, it have tabs, F4 to open a terminal in current folder, and most things you are looking for.

Lexion · 2009-04-26 00:02:29

vifm or the cd,ls,mv,rm,cp combo

darthaxul · 2009-04-26 07:12:27

no, dont get pcman thats really bad, it kept showing partitions that were never mounted which supprised me. and was useless
go the arch way, get emelfm2

BetterLeftUnsaid · 2009-04-26 08:09:30

darthaxul wrote:

no, dont get pcman thats really bad, it kept showing partitions that were never mounted which supprised me.

I could be mistaken, but I think that's the point: pcmanfm will show you things that can be mounted, but won't actually mount them until you click on them.

I love vifm as well, but the lack of any sort of progress notification when copying or moving large files annoys me. So for all the times where I need something more graphical, I usually use pcmanfm without automounting and use autofs instead

litemotiv · 2009-04-26 08:45:52

BetterLeftUnsaid wrote:

I could be mistaken, but I think that's the point: pcmanfm will show you things that can be mounted, but won't actually mount them until you click on them.

but afaik it lacks a password dialog when you click on a drive that needs root confirmation to mount?

bwh1969 · 2009-04-26 13:03:05

krusader

pogeymanz · 2009-04-26 14:16:37

Wow. I tried Xfe because of this thread and I just want to say that I will probably replace Thunar as my FM. Too bad Xfe is pretty ugly.

Rasi · 2009-04-26 14:57:20

bwh1969 wrote:

krusader

+1 - but the original poster wants a DE-independent solution

Dzaro · 2009-04-26 15:10:11

Found this one recently: http://doublecmd.sourceforge.net/

Rasi · 2009-04-26 20:10:14

Dzaro wrote:

Found this one recently: http://doublecmd.sourceforge.net/

Grr... qt version is for 32bit only... and its pascal o_O

Last edited by Rasi (2009-04-26 20:13:47)

bandito · 2009-04-27 09:07:18

tuxcmd

Wilco · 2009-04-27 12:21:36

pogeymanz wrote:

Wow. I tried Xfe because of this thread and I just want to say that I will probably replace Thunar as my FM. Too bad Xfe is pretty ugly.

You can change the icons and theme of xfe quite easily.

However, there are 3 bad things about xfe:
1. Startup timer emulation. When you open a file the program blocks itself for 3 seconds to "simulate" launch feedback.
2. I had a lot of custom file extensions defined and there seems to be a limit on the number you can customize but it's unclear.
3. The design of the program is really bad, just look at the source.

Having said that, it still does the job OK most of the time.

thetrivialstuff · 2009-04-30 18:28:48

I know exactly how you feel about KDE 4 vs. 3 -- Konqueror was the best part of KDE for me (pretty much the only part I ever used, actually; my window manager is a slightly modified version of WMII and I generally loathe "desktop environments"). KDE 4 ruined it, completely and utterly.

I submitted about 20 different bug reports about Konqeuror 4, mostly features that they'd deleted or mangled; some of them are starting to be addressed now. I don't think they'll ever fix the speed issues though, because those are dependent on the underlying KDE 4 libraries as far as I can tell -- it's as if KDE 4 were purposely and deliberately designed to be slower than KDE 3. Even if they fix all of its deficiencies, that'll probably keep me from using it...

Right now there's KDEmod, which will hopefully maintain its KDE 3 branch for a while longer. It's starting to show some problems, though; I haven't been able to get kdemod konqueror 3 to work fully out of the box (the settings pages are all blank). On my main machine, I somehow managed to hack together some of the KDEmod3 packages so that I have a functional konqueror 3 running alongside the Arch repository's version of KDE4. I'm afraid to pacman -Syu now, though, because it will probably break horribly :P

I don't remember exactly how I got konqueror 3 going like that, as I did it in my initial fit of rage after I did the pacman -Syu that got me KDE4 (a decision I have regretted ever since), but it was something like this:

1. move /opt to /opt.kde4
2. make a new /opt
3. download several KDE 3 packages from the KDEmod3 repositories manually
4. extract those packages into the new /opt with tar -xzf (NOT pacman!)
5. try /opt/kde/bin/konqueror
6. read reams of error messages about missing libraries, segfaults, etc.
7. try to supply the missing libraries by downloading other kdemod3 packages and manually extracting them
8. goto 5

Then, when everything worked (sort of), I renamed some stuff so that 'konqueror' is konqueror 4 (I think having it konqueror 3 broke something else, but I don't remember what), and konqueror 3 is called 'k3nqueror'.

If KDEmod3 ever goes away and there's no other good replacement file manager by then, I'll probably take the source code of KDE3 and try to make a standalone version of konqueror out of it. (Which will probably be quite a project because of how interdependent all the KDE components are.)

Some features I "need" in a file manager, besides the ones you mentioned:

- Konqueror's tree view (where you can expand folder branches in the file list)
- Infinite view splitting -- I frequently have my konqueror windows split into 4, sometimes as many as 6 or 7 view panes. Very useful for sorting out files.
- Selection rectangles are sensitive only over files -- I find full-row-select really annoying, because there are no guaranteed "blank" areas that you can click on to clear a selection. I also use this behaviour to grab long-named files that are interspersed with short ones, because they hilight first when the rectangle touches them (you wouldn't think this very useful, but surprisingly often you do want to do something to all the long-named files...)
- Right-clicking on a folder and clicking "Paste" pastes into that folder, not the current one -- you'd be amazed at how many file managers get this wrong. I shouldn't have to cd into a folder just to paste some files there.

pogeymanz · 2009-05-01 01:58:29

Wilco wrote:

pogeymanz wrote:
Wow. I tried Xfe because of this thread and I just want to say that I will probably replace Thunar as my FM. Too bad Xfe is pretty ugly.
However, there are 3 bad things about xfe:
1. Startup timer emulation. When you open a file the program blocks itself for 3 seconds to "simulate" launch feedback.

I was wondering about that. That seems really stupid. Another thing that sucks about it is how slow it is as thumbnails. Otherwise, it's great.

karabaja4 · 2009-05-01 02:37:21

My vote for either pcmanfm or thunar.

pcmanfm has tabs, but thunar is snappier (deletes/renames/moves files instantly) and has trash.

Rasi · 2009-05-01 10:52:51

thetrivialstuff wrote:

it's as if KDE 4 were purposely and deliberately designed to be slower than KDE 3. Even if they fix all of its deficiencies, that'll probably keep me from using it...

Hmm.. kde4 runs smoother than 3.x on my machine...

thetrivialstuff · 2009-05-01 23:42:15

Rasi wrote:

thetrivialstuff wrote:
it's as if KDE 4 were purposely and deliberately designed to be slower than KDE 3. Even if they fix all of its deficiencies, that'll probably keep me from using it...
Hmm.. kde4 runs smoother than 3.x on my machine...

How fast/new is your machine? I don't doubt that KDE 4 is faster on hardware that runs Vista faster than XP, but I'm usually several generations behind on my hardware. Trying to load KDE 4 is torture on a PIII 1 GHz, especially with the clock scaled back when running on battery (it's a laptop).

I understand that for some tasks (gaming, high-end graphics or audio/video processing) it's inappropriate to say "it's useless if it doesn't run snappily on an old computer" -- but file management is NOT one of those tasks.

If something as basic as a file manager (or a desktop environment for that matter) requires modern hardware to do its job quickly, it's fatally flawed in its design. Even the crappiest modern computer can run billions of operations per second and has hundreds or thousands of millions of bytes of memory at its disposal -- if a file manager needs more than 1% of that, it's bloated beyond all reason.

mythus · 2009-05-02 01:23:15

Greetings,

I want to add that 4Pane does tabs and can split into many panes both horizontally and vertically. It has a tree, and such, and has tab support. I will warn you though, it is ugly lol.

thetrivialstuff · 2009-05-02 02:33:40

mythus wrote:

4pane [...]
I will warn you though, it is ugly lol.

You weren't kidding :P

I haven't figured out a way to make it split more than once, though -- the "four" panes it's referring to are really just two, each with its own folder tree. Also, the folder trees don't show files, so it's not like konqueror's tree view (incidentally, the only other place I've seen a tree view like that is on Mac OS).

Arch Linux

#1 2009-04-25 12:42:10

Searching for a good file manager

#2 2009-04-25 12:46:30

Re: Searching for a good file manager

#3 2009-04-25 13:18:12

Re: Searching for a good file manager

#4 2009-04-25 15:01:20

Re: Searching for a good file manager

#5 2009-04-25 15:12:18

Re: Searching for a good file manager

#6 2009-04-25 17:10:57

Re: Searching for a good file manager

#7 2009-04-25 17:45:56

Re: Searching for a good file manager

#8 2009-04-26 00:02:29

Re: Searching for a good file manager

#9 2009-04-26 07:12:27

Re: Searching for a good file manager

#10 2009-04-26 08:09:30

Re: Searching for a good file manager

#11 2009-04-26 08:45:52

Re: Searching for a good file manager

#12 2009-04-26 13:03:05

Re: Searching for a good file manager

#13 2009-04-26 14:16:37

Re: Searching for a good file manager

#14 2009-04-26 14:57:20

Re: Searching for a good file manager

#15 2009-04-26 15:10:11

Re: Searching for a good file manager

#16 2009-04-26 20:10:14

Re: Searching for a good file manager

#17 2009-04-27 09:07:18

Re: Searching for a good file manager

#18 2009-04-27 12:21:36

Re: Searching for a good file manager

#19 2009-04-30 18:28:48

Re: Searching for a good file manager

#20 2009-05-01 01:58:29

Re: Searching for a good file manager

#21 2009-05-01 02:37:21

Re: Searching for a good file manager

#22 2009-05-01 10:52:51

Re: Searching for a good file manager

#23 2009-05-01 23:42:15

Re: Searching for a good file manager

#24 2009-05-02 01:23:15

Re: Searching for a good file manager

#25 2009-05-02 02:33:40

Re: Searching for a good file manager

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