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Author Topic: *NIX: Favorite GUI File Managers?  (Read 20555 times)

ewemoa

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*NIX: Favorite GUI File Managers?
« on: March 17, 2014, 03:28 AM »
Any favorite GUI file managers?

Until a few days ago, was using PCManFM, but do to certain difficulties, went "shopping" and am now trying out SpaceFM (mentioned a bit back by Steven Avery).



There's a list of *nix-only ones at Wikipedia's Comparison of file managers page but I seem to have trouble linking to it directly :)

highend01

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Re: *NIX: Favorite GUI File Managers?
« Reply #1 on: March 17, 2014, 03:58 AM »

ewemoa

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Re: *NIX: Favorite GUI File Managers?
« Reply #2 on: March 17, 2014, 05:41 AM »
Ah, the Wine route!  Thanks for the reminder :)

Shades

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Re: *NIX: Favorite GUI File Managers?
« Reply #3 on: March 17, 2014, 06:53 AM »
Krusader.

After I installed that one in Mint 16 on a VM, I had no trouble accessing network drives, it is a dual pane file manager and native.

40hz

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Re: *NIX: Favorite GUI File Managers?
« Reply #4 on: March 17, 2014, 07:32 PM »
I've been experimenting with Rodent File Manager.

Don't know if I'd call it a favorite since I'm not a big file manager power user for reasons I've given elsewhere. That said, RFM is pretty powerful and fast. Bit of a geek PITA to install but instructions can be found here.

For general purpose day to day use, Mint's default file manager Nemo works just fine for me.

ewemoa

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Re: *NIX: Favorite GUI File Managers?
« Reply #5 on: March 17, 2014, 07:50 PM »
I haven't used Krusader in a long time -- but the last time I had KDE installed, I remember being happy with it (especially the KIO slave functionality).



I'll give Rodent a try.

Shades

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Re: *NIX: Favorite GUI File Managers?
« Reply #6 on: March 17, 2014, 08:07 PM »
Well, I do like and use file managers. And for the same reasons I despise Windows explorer, others love it. Ah well, another thread, another discussion.

For some reason(s) Nemo wouldn't access files on my Windows shares through samba when installed in my VM (VirtualBox 4.3.8 made portable). Then I went to look for alternative file managers within Mint, found Krusader and five minutes later accessing my Windows shares through Samba was no problem anymore. Besides Krusader I didn't add anything else. Nemo remained stubborn, but then, who cares, Krusader did/does the job more than fine.

This strengthened my view regarding OS native file managers. Nice if they work for you, for me they absolutely don't. Now I'm not a Krusader fanboy, after seeing that name in the repositories I remembered that on a previous attempt with Linux I was looking for a Dopus clone (v4 or higher) and this name looked promising back then. Never got around to trying it out at that time.

Never bothered to look any further though...and that is often one of the fun things to do in Linux :-)

ewemoa

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Re: *NIX: Favorite GUI File Managers?
« Reply #7 on: March 18, 2014, 12:55 AM »
Mmm, a digression :)

(VirtualBox 4.3.8 made portable)

I know of:

  http://www.vbox.me/
  http://www.linuxlive...om/en/other-versions

Do you know of another?

Shades

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Re: *NIX: Favorite GUI File Managers?
« Reply #8 on: March 18, 2014, 06:23 AM »
The first link contains the software I used to make VirtualBox portable. After that I never felt a need to look anywhere else to be honest.

However, a Google search revealed this link
« Last Edit: March 18, 2014, 06:33 AM by Shades »

ewemoa

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Re: *NIX: Favorite GUI File Managers?
« Reply #9 on: March 18, 2014, 08:39 AM »
Thanks!

40hz

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Re: *NIX: Favorite GUI File Managers?
« Reply #10 on: March 18, 2014, 12:05 PM »
Interesting screencast on SpaceFM customization and features here:



 8)

Edvard

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Re: *NIX: Favorite GUI File Managers?
« Reply #11 on: March 18, 2014, 08:19 PM »
After leaving Windows, I found myself missing Xplorer² quite a bit (still do) and it doesn't quite work in Wine, so I've burned through plenty of file managers on Linux trying to find a reasonable facsimile.  So far I have had to just grumpily sit down and use Thunar.  It gets the job done, I like the choice between traditional file path/breadcrumb path modes and the choice of tree view or XDG bookmarks in the left panel, the custom definable actions are very useful, AND...
it comes with my favorite desktop environment, Xfce.   :-*

Other file managers I've tried either don't work well, try to do too much with too many icons or are annoyingly minimal.
I purposely ignored Dolphin, Nautilus and Krusader, as I've never been enamored with either KDE or GNOME.  I have my reasons.
Here's all the ones I remember trying, with all the beauty and warts I can remember.

Midnight Commander - If you have fond memories of Norton Commander and it's imitators, you'll like MC.  First of all, dual folder panes rule.  On Slackware, it doubles as the package manager, which is handy, and did I say dual folder panes rule?  One of the first things I install if it's not already included, as it is an absolute necessity if my X goes down.

Xfe - Comes closest to being comparable to Xplorer², though still a little rough looking (uses the Fox Toolkit) and a lot of features up front that I never used, but it has what is most essential: a tree view and two file panes.  That rules plus one.  For some reason, the devs tacked on a bunch of desktop extras as if it was on it's way to being a new window manager.  Did not want.  Looks like they've scaled back recently, maybe I'll give it another shot.

Rox-filer - Too damn minimal.  Sorry, I have nothing else to say.

DoubleCommander - Dual file panes rule, but this one didn't feel completely right out of the box.  The font was too bold, and having directories in brackets I find superfluous and distracting, but most aspects of the GUI are easily changed from the preferences, and the rest of it is pretty solid.  I would like a tree view to go with the dual panes and XDG bookmarks instead of drive icons, but I digress. I've been trying to give this one more face-time to get used to what it can do, but haven't been successful at that.  Developed with Lazarus/Freepascal  
:-*

Emelfm2 - Dual panes rule (is there an echo in here?), but this one tries to do way too much with icons, IMO.  Quite configurable, with lots of good features, but I gave it up after a month cause it just didn't feel right.

Gentoo - Dual panes ru... SO MANY BUTTONS AT THE BOTTOM!

Worker - See Gentoo, above + Tk interface (or is that Motif?).  Either way... Bleah.

SpaceFm - Dual panes ru... sooo many panes... my God, it's full of tabs... o_O.  I know this one has been mentioned, but I gotta add my two cents and say the possibilities for 4 panes each with their own tree view is pretty darn impressive, but I got lost in it.  Maybe one day I'll take a deep breath and try again.  It's still installed, so that's saying something.  

MuCommander - Dual panes... written in Java. :\  Sorry, not much to say about that one either.


So, that's about all I got, I don't think I'll be 100% happy with any one file manager until I find a one-to-one clone of Xplorer² for Linux.  Until then, Thunar is pretty useful as it is, DoubleCommander is almost there, and maybe Xfe will one day hit the sweet spot.
 :Thmbsup:
« Last Edit: March 18, 2014, 08:27 PM by Edvard »

40hz

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Re: *NIX: Favorite GUI File Managers?
« Reply #12 on: March 19, 2014, 01:04 AM »
One dual-pane alternative for Gnome/Cinnamon/MATE users is sunflower-fm. I have it installed for those times when dual-pane is the best way to go. One thing really nice is that Sunflower has an embedded system terminal you can open in a tab within the file manager.

There's a slightly dated video that runs through most of the feature set:


ewemoa

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Re: *NIX: Favorite GUI File Managers?
« Reply #13 on: March 19, 2014, 01:35 AM »
Interesting screencast on SpaceFM customization and features here:



 8)

Definitely things in there that I didn't know -- thanks!

ewemoa

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Re: *NIX: Favorite GUI File Managers?
« Reply #14 on: March 19, 2014, 01:47 AM »
So far I have had to just grumpily sit down and use Thunar.

When I use XFCE, I go for Thunar too :)  Lately I've been trying Fluxbox and Openbox though so XFCE has been..."resting".

Xfe - Comes closest to being comparable to Xplorer², though still a little rough looking (uses the Fox Toolkit) and a lot of features up front that I never used, but it has what is most essential: a tree view and two file panes.  That rules plus one.  For some reason, the devs tacked on a bunch of desktop extras as if it was on it's way to being a new window manager.  Did not want.  Looks like they've scaled back recently, maybe I'll give it another shot.

Somehow never tried this one -- just installed it.  Thanks for mentioning it!

Gentoo - Dual panes ru... SO MANY BUTTONS AT THE BOTTOM!

Ha ha ha -- so true!

SpaceFm - Dual panes ru... sooo many panes... my God, it's full of tabs... o_O.  I know this one has been mentioned, but I gotta add my two cents and say the possibilities for 4 panes each with their own tree view is pretty darn impressive, but I got lost in it.  Maybe one day I'll take a deep breath and try again.  It's still installed, so that's saying something. 

IIRC, it doesn't start up with four panes showing :)



Thanks for sharing your thoughts!

ewemoa

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Re: *NIX: Favorite GUI File Managers?
« Reply #15 on: March 19, 2014, 01:51 AM »
One dual-pane alternative for Gnome/Cinnamon/MATE users is sunflower-fm. I have it installed for those times when dual-pane is the best way to go.

Their project page mentions:

Currently this project is still in its early alpha stage.

...but it at least looks pleasant :)

One thing really nice is that Sunflower has an embedded system terminal you can open in a tab within the file manager.

That does sound nice -- I wonder if at some point they'll go for displaying in the same tab as a file / directory listing with synchronizing the current directory.

40hz

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Re: *NIX: Favorite GUI File Managers?
« Reply #16 on: March 20, 2014, 08:12 AM »
I wonder if at some point they'll go for displaying in the same tab as a file / directory listing with synchronizing the current directory.

That would be handy. Maybe somebody could suggest it? They devs are on Google+ here.

I'd do it myself - except 40hz doesn't do Google+ for reasons not worth cluttering up this thread getting into. ;) 8)
« Last Edit: March 20, 2014, 08:28 AM by 40hz »

ewemoa

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Re: *NIX: Favorite GUI File Managers?
« Reply #17 on: March 21, 2014, 01:16 AM »
I don't do Google+ either.

My sense is that the idea is likely to come up at some point if it hasn't already :)

ewemoa

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Re: *NIX: Favorite GUI File Managers?
« Reply #18 on: April 12, 2014, 09:32 PM »
Sunflower is surviving here :)

Some nice points:
  • Handy to use the "Command entry" field to start an HTTP daemon (e.g. mongoose) for quickly making some files available.
  • Somehow the candidates that come up for "Open with" are more to my liking than with the analogous in SpaceFM.
  • Breadcrumb navigation is unobtrusive - works by clicking on an appropriate portion of a displayed path.

Some puzzlement:
  • Failed to locate a way to change the currently showing directory via editing a text field representing a path. - Clicking on the folder icon next to the path seems to help :)
  • Control-selecting something after some row is already highlighted doesn't appear to include the already-highlighted row in the ultimate selection.

Appear to be using 0.1a (58), FWIW.
« Last Edit: April 13, 2014, 09:08 AM by ewemoa »

tosim

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Re: *NIX: Favorite GUI File Managers?
« Reply #19 on: May 20, 2014, 09:07 AM »
I've used several of those mentioned here, but finally settled on DoubleCommander. I particularly like that it lets me change the attributes of files and folders. .

ewemoa

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Re: *NIX: Favorite GUI File Managers?
« Reply #20 on: May 21, 2014, 02:45 AM »
I tried Double Commander before under Windows and thought it was promising -- just tried to compile for *NIX via:

  http://doublecmd.sourceforge.net/mediawiki/index.php/Development#From_command_line_.28Linux.29

Unfortunately, no success so far.



Examination of Arch's doublecmd-svn PKGBUILD gave enough hints to build source obtained via Subversion.  For Gentoo, the following works (with appropriate things installed -- e.g. lazarus):

1. Obtain source via Subversion:
svn checkout svn://svn.code.sf.net/p/doublecmd/code/trunk doublecmd-code

2. Edit the line in build.sh which reads:
export lazbuild=$(which lazbuild)
to be:
export lazbuild="$(which lazbuild) --lazarusdir=/usr/share/lazarus"

3. Compile via script:
sh build.sh all gtk2

4. Execute resulting binary named: doublecmd

Haven't had much time to play with the result yet, but am a bit wary of the 0.6.0 alpha status...
« Last Edit: May 21, 2014, 04:24 AM by ewemoa »

Edvard

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Re: *NIX: Favorite GUI File Managers?
« Reply #21 on: May 21, 2014, 09:12 PM »
I'm occasionally using the 0.5.9 beta.  Works well enough, no crashes so far.  :Thmbsup:

But, maybe I want to bleed a little...
* Edvard downloads 0.6.0