The best file manager ever?

[viking777]

I like file managers, always have, don't know why, but I just do. I am always on the lookout for new ones as I have never found the 'ultimate' file manager for my needs, although I have tried just about all of them. At the moment I use Dolphin as my default file manager even though I run a Gnome desktop. It is an excellent manager, but heavy on resources if you aren't already running KDE (or perhaps even if you are). So recently I tried a new one. Now I don't know if it is the best file manager ever, hence the question mark in the title, because that depends a lot on what you are looking for. I do know though, that for my purposes it was certainly worth installing and it might be for you too. I will warn you from the start though this is a 'Power Users' tool, if you are happy with Nautilus or even think that is difficult then this will make your head explode - as file managers go it is complicated - very complicated, so unless you are an inveterate tinkerer and don't mind reading help files then leave well alone.

It describes itself as front end to the command line - well all gui's are that, but this one doesn't attempt to hide it as much as the others, in fact it regularly shows you the commands it is about to run and invites you to inspect and amend them if you feel it necessary (only for more complex commands, not for simple file operations). This is not only informative but if you are still a cli beginner it is also very educational.

So what impresses me about it?

The amount of options that it has and the scope for altering them make it like a KDE interface on steroids. It even has a 'design' mode for you to craft your own menu's with commands or scripts that are relevant to your particular way of working (it even pre-fills the more boring parts of the script for you so all you have to do is enter the code directly - I haven't tried this as I am not fully happy with scripting, although I have written my own 'menu' to call 'locate' from within the manager). If you are good at scripting and like to share your scripts with others it allows you to easily do that as well.

Like one pane, two pane, three pane, four pane - you can have them all - one mouse click to get what you prefer. LIke tabs or new windows - equally easy.

Like root functions in your file manager - there are scores of them here, more than I have ever seen before, and if you can't find one then it has a 'root window' in which everything is carried out as root (and it is helpfully coloured red to distinguish it from a normal window). And of course as stated above, if you can't find a root function, but you know how to script it then you can build it for yourself.

Complete and fully functional control of removable media is one of the main things that I want from a file manager. It is so complete and comprehensive here that it even offers a daemon mode which will run automatically on start up and 'take over' the removable media functions from your normal DE. I haven't tried this, but its control is so precise that it might be worth while.

Ever heard of a file manager that will backup and restore a full disk or an mbr from its interface? Or format/erase a disk? - this one does (using fsarchiver or partimage for backups). I have tried most of those functions and they all work.

It is lightweight and fast.

I could go on forever about it's good points, so how about some bad ones (nothing is perfect).

It is not a network browser this is what they say: It browses only mounted filesystems and does not navigate smb://, ftp://, and similar URLs. It is possible to add custom commands which automate mounting of network shares, or to use another program to mount the shares locally.

I can't get the search function to work, I don't know why - hence the 'locate' menu item, which I prefer anyway, and I might add a 'find' one as well shortly.

It is quite a new project so it may change rapidly.

So what is it and where do you get it?

Homepage here:
http://spacefm.sourceforge.net/

Download here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/spacefm/files/
(you need one of the first two files)

User Manual here:
http://ignorantguru.github.com/spacefm/ ... vices-root
(you WILL need to read it)

And as I said - not newbie friendly.

[xenopeek]

Writing your own scripts that easily sounds good I'm happy with Nautilus, as anything more than browsing to a folder I do from the command line anyway. But this might be nice. Don't start by looking at this screenshot though

[GeneC]

Thanks Viking

Always intersting to try something new.

I have been playing around with Midnight Commander (mc) Runs from command line.
(VERY handy when something breaks.)



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnight_Commander

-------------------------------------

And Gnome-Commander (GTK) runs from GUI.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME_Commander

You've no doubt tried those already
But, if not, they are worth a look.

Both are in the repos.

[MALsPa]

Thanks for the tip, viking, I'll definitely take a look at SpaceFM. I normally prefer to use Dolphin no matter which environment I'm using, although I've used several others here and there. I used to use Krusader a lot back in KDE 3. Lately I've been using emelFM2 in Fedora 16.

[viking777]

@GeneC - Yep, I have mc installed as well (like I said I like file managers!) and I have tried gnome commander also.

@MaLsPa - I am an ex 'Krusader' man as well, I liked it a lot, I have also tried emelfm2 (did I mention I like file managers )

The power of spacefm takes a lot of beating though but bear in mind it is a 'new toy' for me and new toys always seem the best.

[Monsta]

I used to use Krusader a lot back in KDE 3.

Same here, but I couldn't break the habit even when KDE3 died and I moved to Gnome 2. Meanwhile, Krusader has been rewritten for KDE4, then its development slowed down greatly, and now I think its version will be 2.4.0-beta1 forever.

Nevertheless, my work PC with LMDE (Gnome) now has additional 80 mb of KDE4 packages just to run Krusader, and it's one of my everyday tools. Well, I've tried almost every native GTK+ two-panel file manager. Most of them looked like... well, like their developers had no idea what they'd written it for and wouldn't use that stuff themselves.

Several months ago I've started helping with testing Sunflower, but it's far far away even from beta stage.



Still, I feel it has the potential. So if someone is interested in GTK+ two-panel file manager, you can try it out and help with testing too.

[viking777]

In my opening post here I mentioned that I could not get the file search to work. I have had some progress with this, but it is still not that useful. Example:

In my home folder I have a file called 'Holidays.txt' (it is a list of things I need to pack when going on holiday). I find that if I search for 'holidays' or 'Holidays' it finds nothing, but if I search for 'holidays*' it finds it straight away.

Similarly with the recently troublesome '~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel'. If I search for 'recently' or 'recently-used' it finds nothing but if I search for 'recently*' it finds the file, and a couple of others, instantly (of course as it is in a hidden folder you have to enable this option before searching).

Not quite sure what this means except for the fact that it doesn't work as I expect it too. The lesson is use an asterisk when searching.

The same goes for the content search, although here things are slightly different. Suppose you have a file with the word 'London' in it. If you search for 'London' it will find it, but if you search for 'london' it will not. However if you search for 'london' and then tick 'case sensitive' it will find it. This is of course the complete opposite of what should happen since 'london' with a lower case 'l' needs a case insensitive search to find it if your original file has a capital 'L' - I can only assume they have these the wrong way around. The lesson here is always tick 'case sensitive' and then your search won't be!

The size and date search however appears to work normally although I haven't tested it extensively.

So if you remember those rules the search works fairly well

[bimsebasse]

Thanks for the heads up, viking, will definitely try it out but am always disappointed trying out new file managers in linux! Nautilus is rubbish with large libraries and goes buggy on me fairly often. Tried Dolphin recently but it had issues of its own.

[viking777]

I am still loving this file manager - I have created 4 personal menu items now, clamscan(system), clamscan(file), chkrootkit and the original locate. I must admit it would be easy to get carried away with this design function and end up swamping your menus with cli commands!

If anybody else has installed it could you carry out a short test for me on the 'Find' function. If your results are the same as mine I will file a bug report about it.

Create a new file in your ~ folder, and type one word in it. I used the example 'London' but any word will do as long as it starts with a capital letter. Then go to File>File Search (which should be set to your ~ folder unless you changed pages in the file manager), leave the first tab as it is and go to the second tab 'Content'. Type the word london (or whatever word you chose, but without the capital letter at the start) into the 'File Contains' box and then press 'Find'.

If your installation behaves the same as mine it will not find that newly created file. Next tick the 'Case Sensitive' box and search again for the same word -london. If your installation is the same as mine, this time it will find the file, indicating to me at least that the 'Case Sensitive'/'Case Insensitive' logic is back to front.

Two things. If I have suddenly had a brainstorm and my understanding of 'Case Sensitive'/'Case Insensitive' is wrong somehow then please tell me now. It will save me making a bigger fool of myself than I have already and also save the developer some time researching nonsense.

The second thing is that if you have a very large ~ folder the first search (where it fails to find the file) will take quite a while. You can always shorten this search time be creating the new file in a specific folder inside your ~ folder and restricting the search to that folder only, the results will be just as valid.

TIA

viking

[3fRI]

I'm still trying to figure out how file managers actually work. Nautilus seems too limited, but I think Midnight Commander would work best for me at this point in my learning.

[viking777]

I'm still trying to figure out how file managers actually work. Nautilus seems too limited, but I think Midnight Commander would work best for me at this point in my learning.

Nautilus has been almost crippled in my opinion, I don't know how anyone can use it, or even offer it for use for that matter. MC is a very capable file manager indeed and certainly worth having just for the fact it works in a shell login or virtual terminal. A lot of people use Dolphin even on Gnome, but I think spacefm has them all beaten for sheer power and versatility, it is basically a graphical front end for the command line and at my stage of 'development' in the Linux world it is just what I am looking for. A few years ago I would have thought it too complicated. Maybe in a few years time I will be using a terminal and vi all the time - although at the moment I shudder at the idea, particularly vi

But that is what it is all about, picking the tool that meets your needs at the time, and this is the beauty of Linux of course because all the tools are out there to suit all levels of experience, you just gotta find them.

[dwainehead]

All clones from the original XTree Gold! in the modern the closest is Volkoff's Midnight Commander both were DOS based, now exist some newer implementations. Still some Xtree type clones avilable for Linux...

http://www.xtreefanpage.org/lowres/x10dirja.htm

Looks like thiere even a .deb package avilable, I'll be looking for it for myself...

[jazz.h]

I have stopped searching for a total comm clone when I found Double Commander.
The only issue for me is - while browsing samba/windows network I can't always see linux machines even if they exist in the same workgroup as the win ones.

[viking777]

I think what people are missing about this outstanding piece of work is the power to almost build it yourself without knowing the first thing about coding - design mode. To me this is a revelation, it takes some understanding, but is all documented in the User Guide, (and if I can work it out it so can anyone). Create your own menu items, reorder them, have them only appear in certain situations (context mode). This is superb, this is really what Linux should be and used to be about before it became 'Sanitized for my protection'

I am knocked out by spacefm, I have removed Dolphin already, I removed Nautilus as well, but that had consequences and unfortunately I had to put it back again. As a non-coder (I would struggle to even write shell scripts) this file manager is the most empowering thing I have ever encountered since I found Linux itself.

I can understand that the inability to handle smb etc would render it unusable to some people though.

[MALsPa]

viking, does SpaceFM have file previews (especially for image files)?

[viking777]

I can't see that option MALsPa, but then again it is not one I would actually look for, so go with 'no' so as not to be disappointed.

[MALsPa]

Yeah. Couldn't find anything about them in the documentation, didn't see any in the screenshots. Previews in Dolphin are kind of a big time-saver here, so I guess I'll just stick with using that.

[claudecat]

Spacefm is nice... I first encountered it using antiX and was amazed at its flexibility. I generally prefer dolphin for its blend of power and ease of configurability, and mc for those times when I don't want a gui mucking things up. It amazes me that mc isn't installed by default in every distro. It can really be a life saver when X won't start and you need to edit some config files.