Main Area and Open Discussion > General Software Discussion
What's your preferred File Manager
Tuxman:
As for the programs you mentioned, I've used both extensively, but quite a long time ago so I don't have much experience with the recent versions. They were both solid performers at the time, though. SpeedCommander is very German-centric and Salamander seems to want to nickel and dime you for every plugin.-Innuendo (May 31, 2014, 10:48 AM)
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As a German, the centricism isn't too bad for me. :P
But thanks for the "comparison" though.
rjbull:
Orthodox file managers, when they were invented, catered to a world where storage was small and users only stored data in a few places. In the modern world, I find that I need to have more than just two panels open at a time.-Innuendo (May 31, 2014, 10:48 AM)
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I think it was DOS Navigator that allowed you to have multiple pairs of panels open at a time. I couldn't multi-task well enough for that, preferring to do things serially, where Total Commander's favourite folders list and folder history were very helpful. Perhaps it helps if you have a big monitor. For the record, here's an interesting link: Less is More: Orthodox File Managers as Sysadmin IDE (the Orthodox File Managers page).
Innuendo:
As a German, the centricism isn't too bad for me. :P
But thanks for the "comparison" though.
-Tuxman (May 31, 2014, 11:15 AM)
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There was a time when I could give you an in-depth comparison of every Windows file manager available (and some Mac & Linux ones as well), but I'm afraid these days my knowledge is a little dated. Total Commander, FAR, and Directory Opus are the most powerful and the most versatile, extensible products on the market. Every other file manager is just a sub-set of those three.
peter.s:
Thanks, rjbull, for the link to softpanorama.org, some instructive content, even if it's been a LONG while I've seen some other site as ugly: straight from 1983, or so it seems to me.
He's got some page "Programmable keyboards" over there, too, with "Using AHK instead of a prog. kb" - well, you know, I think by now, that it's "Using AKS ON a prog. kb", of course, i.e. just assigning weird key combis on the prog. kb, and then intercepting those impossible key combis by ahk, to do the real scripting.
Tuxman, your Germanese, "As a German, the centricism isn't too bad for me." is awful, Germans to this ALL THE TIME. I'm no teacher, can't give the right terms to it, but let me explain: "As a xyz" is subject 1; then, "the centricism" (or whatever) is subject 2, and the verb, here "isn't", depends on subject 2, whilst the "As a" for subject 1 unsuccessfully tries to make it depend from subject 1. As they say, Goethe's spirit would rotate in his sepulchre, had it knowledge of such ways of speaking. Thus, every German out there/here, please, say, "For me/him/whomever as a xyz" (by this, transposing subject 1 into accustive, by this breaking up the link with the verb), if really you can't do without the "as a" structure which is of utmost ugliness anyway.
As for SC: NO English-language forum, just in German; NO English-language help file, just in German; no help worth to speak of in the Forum, even in German, just Germans musing abing absence of features, and the developer not deigning to intervene/clarify/inform, except for very rare occasions. Additional prob: In order to "find" something either in the help file or the forum, you must know the German term first, and be assured they just don't use simple translations but have their own, very special SC terminology for many common English terms... (And you should be able to read German to begin with, of course.)
Comes with several add-ins, e.g. a text search function, similar to the one in XY (and neither better nor worse, neither slower nor faster than there; I own both and compared extensively), or a synch tool (which is really bad), and, of course, bulk renaming as any paid file manager offers to some degree (see below).
"Every other file manager is just a sub-set of those three." Innuendo, this is simply not true, Besides, whenever I see a FAR screenshot (as in the linked softpanorama), I feel an urge to scream out loud (Wanna buy my NC, Dos or Win, anyone, btw? = rhetoric question).
Of course, TC is very powerful, but 2 things:
- My ways of doing an AHK tutorial may be debatable, and yes, it was a "work in the make", and I should have it revised, and edited; cut up into several posts, it's become a mess. But then, I tried at least (and am not too motivated to do the necessary work on it, by lack of feedback, i.e. no AHK noob to ask about details, so what!), and any TC "expert" would be free to do something similar (cf. the post above, about the need to search it all together, over numerous hours of hard work, from dozens of forum entries), in order to make TC more "accessible", both from a technical pov and from a gui pov (yes, the step from bold to regular font is known by now, but that's not enough, as we all know).
- But that is not done, and this brings me to a second observation: My tries with the forum were that the developer doesn't take part in it, except some possible exceptions, and if you explain another one of the innumarable weirdnesses of TC and ask for an option to have it another, more "normal" way, TC experts will explain, with lots of goodwill (cf. DO forum, where you will be attacked instead), "why" it is as it is, and only that way, and most of the time, these explanations are quite weird on their own, whilst the developer just has it his way, no any other. Thus, the form of discussion is much more pleasant in TC, than in DO forum, but you quickly get the impression that nothing really will ever change though, and version history (8 now) proves that your impression is right. Also, explanations about "how to" are sparse, and (as said above by Innuendo), are both fractionized and aleatoric... and, my impression, TC experts on that forum like it a lot like that.
Thus, TC expertise has become their hobby, and just as I don't count my spare time spent with AHK, they do similar with TC - of course, people who preserve a minimum of objectivity would argue that time spent with a scripting (or programming) language might be time which, at least in perspective, is spent to some reasonable goal, whilst for file managers, it should be "want to do something? here it is, immediate availabality, so that it won't make you lose time unnecessarily": A file manager should be a readily-available instrument for special tasks, not your new folly.
The same applies to other file managers, to a degree, and certainly to DO where "spending time with my preferred file manager DO" has become a hobby on its own for quite some people, whilst the intuitiveness is often absent; on the other hand, DO's got one of the very best help files out there, which helps a lot for lots (if not all) of things.
But at the end of the day, whilst most daily functionality is perfectly done by FC or such, and whilst XY (today on bits, 50% if you havn't got it yet) certainly has got the most pleasant photo viewer functionality of the immediate competition:
As soon as you get to some special needs, you try your 5 or 8 file commanders, 1 by 1, and then you risk to do it by hand. Last weekend, e.g., I needed to rename JUST the FIRST term of a bunch of folders from upper- to lowercase (whilst the rest of those names would have to be left unchanged). So I spent more than 2 hours with my numerous file managers, and tried to apply, where it DID apply, my knowledge about several regex replace flavors, to no avail whatsoever, and finally, in XY, it did it manually, but renaming in the XY rename list, which at least spared me multiple F2, Return, F2...
Every file manager does it its own way, deep down to regex replace in file names, and the respective help files are far from being up to par, and you end up thinking that you search, and try, in vain, because the relevant special functionality simply isn't there.
A last word on SC (I'm repeating myself here, but it's important, and, ok, I didn't try the last versions of it): If you want quick access to a subfolder (beginning with "ac"), you enter "ac": So far, so ubiquitous. But then, in order to display that subfolder, you press enter TWO times, not once (or you opt for (the totally awful) "NC mode"), and quite frankly, that drives me crazy, since it forces you to always reflect on "in which file manager / program am I? 1 enter, or 2 enter? So many people in their forum criticised this crazy behaviour, and the developer didn't lend them his ear, over many years (as said, perhaps it's set now, but I'm not sure at all about this).
I like XY, for photos. For everything else, I use FC. And to finish: I suspect SC people to not being able to write in English, and that would then of course hold them back over there, in that depressing but German-speaking forum.
mwb1100:
I didn't know that FAR was open source (http://code.google.com/p/farmanager/)! For some reason, that makes me want to try it.
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