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A Survey of Linux File Managers

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“Linux file manager ontogeny encapsulates the history of GNU/Linux. File managers began as command-line and generic graphical tools and progressed to desktop-specific ones, gaining sophistication along the way, with mouse controls, for example, replacing buttons. Today, the more than a dozen options highlighted here will suit users with widely varied interests.”

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Thom Holwerda

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54 Comments

  1. 2006-12-19 11:03 pm
    TurboI

    I agree on Krusader. It seems to have the best combo of new-ness and old-ness. One other file manager that I like to use on the rare occasions I use GNOME is GNOME Commander. Oh, DFM is based on OS/2’w Workplace Shell, IIRC.

  2. 2006-12-19 11:33 pm
    1c3d0g

    …they forgot to mention PCMan File Manager, which is similar to Thunar. Both are great file managers if you use alternative desktops, IMO.

    http://pcmanfm.sourceforge.net/

  3. 2006-12-20 12:07 am
    Dudesdad

    Xfe is one I use in Fluxbox.

  4. 2006-12-20 12:09 am
    vermaden

    They also did not mentioned very popular, light and fast ROX-Filer, but all in all

  • 2006-12-20 12:09 am
    SaidinUnleashed

    I’ve user NC/MC for too many years to change now. They’re small, fast, and do everything I want.

    • 2006-12-20 1:26 am
      fsckit

      Agreed. I have yet to find a file manager other than MC that has all the features I need and runs just as good on a server as it does my desktop.

      • 2006-12-20 5:18 am
        SaidinUnleashed

        Agreed. I have yet to find a file manager other than MC that has all the features I need and runs just as good on a server as it does my desktop.

        I still get a nice little ego boost when I see the looks on other people’s faces when I fire up a file manager over a null connection. :3

        Especially after they’ve slaved away using plain old sh.

        • 2006-12-20 8:57 am
          superstoned

          I like the egoboost when I fire up ANY kde application, including Konqueror and Krusader, and work graphically using ssh on any server, just like it was my local system…

          • 2006-12-20 1:09 pm
            fsckit

            And exactly how is that supposed to work over a serail connection? That’s what I thought…moving right along.

          • 2006-12-20 2:44 pm
            superstoned

            I’m pretty sure it won’t be too hard (if it’s not there already) to get that to work too. if you can use an ssh connection, you should be able to use any connection which can give a basic shell…

          • 2006-12-20 8:39 pm
            Havin_it

            If you can ssh there, you can do it. Either use the fish KIOSlave (fish://user@host/path/ in the addressbar) or, because I like mounting stuff, mount it with sshfs ( http://fuse.sourceforge.net/sshfs.html ) provided the connection is reasonably speedy.

            Edited 2006-12-20 20:41

    • 2006-12-20 4:01 am
      ma_d

      The tar.gz support was pretty awesome on the one I used.

    • 2006-12-20 8:16 am
      agentj

      I use MC as a file manager and development environment. It provides extremelly fast interface, text editor with syntax highlighting and many other good features. I use MC even on Windows (Cygwin+XWindows). When I’m building project and I want to check errors while editing the code it’s usually just Ctrl+O, look at errors, Ctrl+O and back to editing of the code. I really tried other graphical file managers, but I didn’t like them (getting used to Nautilus, though).

      • 2006-12-20 6:02 pm
        Doc Pain

        “I use MC as a file manager and development environment. It provides extremelly fast interface, text editor with syntax highlighting and many other good features. “

        Same here, too. The MC is a very good implementation of “source target operations” which seem to be the most ones used. The mc.ext mechanism allows “running files” (to be correct: run the registered applications and load the file) by pressing RETURN (or double-clicking, if you like it), so there’s a good “interoperability” even on GUI systems (inside xterm, where it even supports mouse drag’n’drop). The syntax highlighting is customizable and extendable. Configuration is possible via text files. It even supports Meta key combinations (for those who are happy to have Meta keys). Those who are familiar with the old Norton Commander interface and keybindings are usually happy with MC. SMB and FTP links, as well as archive operations, complete the usefulness of this “must-have tool”.

        Personally I use the MC in the GUI world (together with WindowMaker) and even in 80×25 console mode. It’s accessible via SSH connections. What for? For file searching, sorting, managing, for development (as mentioned above – mcedit) and even for multimedia stuff. BTW, I don’t use it on Linux, but on UNIX.

        I have not found a file manager that does everything the MC can do (or does it better) yet.

        Edited 2006-12-20 18:03

  • 2006-12-20 12:18 am
    Sodki

    Nautilus is useful as a file viewer, but as a file manager, it is tolerable only in browser mode, which uses one pane for the directory tree and is only available from System Tools -> File Browser.

    Well, excuse me for liking Nautilus’ spatial mode. And besides, you can define the browser mode as the default on Nautilus preferences. As some readers pointed out, the author also missed a few notable file managers. Not a good article, in my opinion.

    • 2006-12-20 12:39 am
      twenex

      excuse me for liking Nautilus’ spatial mode.

      Yep, makes more sense to me, too.

      • 2006-12-20 12:45 am
        rayiner

        Ditto. The author just seems to be some guy who hasn’t yet grokked the power of spatial file management.

        • 2006-12-20 1:50 am
          Brandybuck

          The author just seems to be some guy who hasn’t yet grokked the power of spatial file management.

          The author is hardly alone in this. I too, am one of the stupid people who don’t like spatial file management. This is even after being weaned on OS/2 Warp, which started the whole thing.

          But this is Free Software. We aren’t beholden to the usability police. We can do what we want. Even if it’s different than what you want.

          • 2006-12-20 1:57 am
            twenex

            The author is hardly alone in this. I too, am one of the stupid people who don’t like spatial file management. This is even after being weaned on OS/2 Warp, which started the whole thing.

            *Cough* *Choke*

            Erm, I think you will find the Mac and Amiga got there before OS/2…Maybe even the Xerox Star did.

            But this is Free Software. We aren’t beholden to the usability police. We can do what we want. Even if it’s different than what you want.

            Good point, but the point we were complaining about was that the author was trying to suggest there was something “wrong” with spatial management.

        • 2006-12-20 2:09 am
          CowMan

          Imagine if you could collapse all those open folder windows into some sort of managed and consistent hierarchy, ‘navigationally’ if you will. ;)

          Spatial is pretty intuitive, esp. within the ‘desktop’ analogy, but if you’re working with a large number of files – or files/folders, such as my friggen music collection.. I find it to cumbersome to use. Need those tabs, keyboard shortcuts, and tree’s!

          Krusader looks pretty promising though, emerging that as I type this.

          • 2006-12-20 3:51 am
            orestes

            There’s no shortage of keyboard shortcuts in Nautilus.

          • 2006-12-20 6:02 am
            Best

            The most awesome ability Nautilus has, is the Spatial Tree. It is the feature that I could not live in a spatial world without. It is exactly what you’re asking for. You can keep your files in a good hierarchy, and when you need a larger more detailed view, an icon mode view of the window is only a couple clicks away.

            Also the ‘Home is Desktop’ option still only available through gconf is practically necessary for spatial as well. I wish they’d expose this functionality.

  • 2006-12-20 12:41 am
    hal2k1

    I’m one who finds it annoying if there is even a slight delay in the file manager coming up.

    For XFce & Gnome desktops, PCmafm Thunar and Rox are best (as pure file managers), followed by emelfm2.

    For KDE, Dolphin has only recently become useable, and Thunar (and I expect PCmanFM) uses a lot of GNOME dependencies that would otherwise not have to be installed on a KDE desktop.

    Dolphin is still good for a really light filemanager under KDE (except setting bookmarks is clunky), but since KDE 3.5.5 I have found that it no longer really has a significant speed advantage over Konqueror or Krusader. Given that all three KDE filemanager programs (Konqueror, Krusader and Dolphin) start up whth about the same snappiness, then in general if I want to manage files & directories I will use Krusader, and if I want to “poke around, search for, browse and look at files” I will use Konqueror. I have now de-installed Dolphin, because of the clunky setting of bookmarks, because it leaves .dolphin scattered files everywhere, and because it doesn’t support viewing files all that well.

    Edited 2006-12-20 00:43

    • 2006-12-20 12:51 am
      twenex

      it leaves .dolphin scattered files everywhere,

      Yow. What are they for?

      • 2006-12-20 1:28 am
        hal2k1

        //it leaves .dolphin scattered files everywhere,

        Yow. What are they for?//

        They record the view settings for each directory. You can have a different view for each directory, and the next time that Dolphin is used to view that directory it will look for a .dolphin file, and if present Dolphin will use the information in that file to restore the view settings to what it was last time.

        • 2006-12-20 2:14 am
          CowMan

          WMP is a disaster for this – I’ve had to make a number of shares on the network read-only to stop ‘albumart{big}fdjfgjfkfdkdf.jpg’, it’s small version, and a thumbnail file from popping up all over the place. grr. An evil habit, if you ask me.

          • 2006-12-20 8:56 pm
            Havin_it

            I feel ya. I eventually turned off downloading of album metadata altogether, those bast–d folders were so annoying. I’d rather use EasyTAG, and get more control over the results to boot.

            And don’t get me started on Thumbs.db!

  • 2006-12-20 1:05 am
    kadymae

    I love Nautilus’ spacial mode; it’s the most intuitive way for me to navigate and manipulate my files.

    That said, if I can’t have Nautilus, gimmie Thunar. It’s PDQ, easy to use/navigate, and doesn’t get in my way.

    In fact, I wish the file manager in OS X were as good as either one of these. Because as soon as I dig down a few layers of nested files in OS X, the interface becomes (IMHO) cumbersome. OS X does many things well, but here I find the Linux solutions better and more elegant.

    Edited 2006-12-20 01:06

  • 2006-12-20 1:18 am
    acobar

    I like to use it with fluxbox. Actually, I like it a lot and use it when I’m running xfce too. It has a nice image browser and archiver to play with.

    http://wolfpack.twu.net/Endeavour2/

    • 2006-12-20 8:24 pm
      Sphinx

      Hard to believe he missed it along with ROX and evidence.

  • 2006-12-20 1:43 am
    melkor

    To be entirely honest, for most users, especially those coming across as Microsoft Windows refugees, KDE’s Konqueror or Gnome’s Nautilus will do a fine job. Those making a preference for Krusador or NC/MC clones simply do so because that’s what they’re used to, or they have a specific user need that they meet (and maybe other file managers do not meet). That doesn’t mean that NC/MC clones are better than Konqueror/Nautilus (dor does it mean that they’re worse either I might add).

    In the end, for most people, Konqueror and Nautilus do the job, and do it well.

    Dave

  • 2006-12-20 1:53 am
    deanlinkous

    nautilus is fine….if a bit heavy

    Spatial mode is cool if you get used to it and tweak it a bit. But as stated it is one checkbox to turn it back into plain old clark kent.

    pcmanfm is looking VERY good – remind me of the old gmc which I miss…

    Not a overly amazing article. It felt more like something a classmate was telling you about while waiting a couple minutes for class to start.

  • 2006-12-20 2:29 am
    Cass

    Cant say that any file manager is that good, nothing beats managing files with the good old command line, its quicker and less clunky than all the rest … and the hands never have to leave the keyboard to get where you need to go ….

    • 2006-12-20 4:32 am
      WorknMan

      Cant say that any file manager is that good, nothing beats managing files with the good old command line, its quicker and less clunky than all the rest

      I disagree. While it works well for some things, I was browsing a folder full of about 100 mp3 files, and I needed to drag 50 of them or so to another folder, so I just CTRL+clicked the ones I wanted and dragged them over there. Sure, you could do that with the command line, but it would’ve been slower, I think.

      As for the file mangers, being a diehard Directory Opus user myself in Windows, Krusader is the only one that looks like it comes close. I just hope it’s faster than Konquerer or Nautilus ;) I’ll definitely have to check it out on my next Linux install.

      • 2006-12-20 5:21 am
        Cass

        Yeah your probably correct, it depends on usage, personally i store everything i need in the correct place in the first instance, so ti never need to move 50 mp3’s anywhere … if i do itunes sync’s them

        • 2006-12-20 5:05 pm
          kadymae

          it depends on usage, personally i store everything i need in the correct place in the first instance

          So do I and I still need to move things.

          See, I have a folder called Writing and in Writing there are several subfolders to describe various categories, one of which is WIP (works in progress).

          When something gets finished it is taken out of WIP and dumped into Writing; only when something is then posted online do I move the files to their final home(s) based on what category they fall under.

          It’s my work flow so that I can see what’s a WIP, what’s finished but not yet HTML’d, and what’s been posted.

          And trust me, it would suck rocks to manipulate them at the command line.

  • 2006-12-20 3:01 am
    Dima

    They forgot about BFM…

    http://www.forchheimer.se/bfm/

    • 2006-12-20 1:12 pm
      viton

      http://www.forchheimer.se/bfm/

      Wow, obviously this is the future ^_^

      I use worker because it is powerful and configurable, althrough still need some polishing.

      Edited 2006-12-20 13:12

  • 2006-12-20 6:13 am
    Devon

    Is it just me, or does this read like he was only looking for an excuse to bash Nautilus? He spends little time on anything other then expressing his opinions about the filemanagers he personally cares about, and even the mild praise for Konqueror seems to be positioned only to make Nautilus sound worse.

    This isn’t a survey of all the many file managers that will suit anyone, this is a “why you should use the filemanagers I like” review with a poorly vailed “Im bitter about the current direction of filemanagers” rant.

  • 2006-12-20 6:43 am
    antenna

    I tend to use Thunar (with Openbox), I like the compact list view, similar to what I used to use in Explorer, it surprises me that Nautilus doesn’t have this (it’s ‘compact’ is a bit of a joke.). It’s also quite a bit faster & less clunky than Nautilus. I would appreciate smb browsing but I don’t think that’s going to happen.

  • 2006-12-20 7:54 am
    h3rman

    While most KDE users will figure out soon that the name Konqueror refers to the browser/file manager/etc., most Gnome users will need a while to find out that the default file manager even has a name.

    The reason is maybe that Nautilus is (too?) clean and simple. You don’t “see” it that much, really. Another reason may be that Nautilus may work differently in different distributions. Ubuntu gives you the browsing mode upon double clicking a folder icon, whereas Fedora Core still uses the default, simple mode that gives a lot of clutter when you click your way deep down subdirectories (right click+”browse” solves a lot).

    I’d say, a good file manager needs at least perfect, well-integrated file name search; Ctrl+F, there you go. That’s not as resource hungry as Beagle, and still sufficient in many cases.

    How about using Konqueror in Gnome? For world peace!

  • 2006-12-20 9:13 am
    Brmbolec

    They actually forgot about Tux Commander, it is available at http://tuxcmd.sf.net

  • 2006-12-20 10:46 am
    Anonymous Coward

    I had never heard of Dolphin before this article. They didn’t have an Edgy download, so I checked my repos… low and behold there it is.

    I like it so far. It’s like using Explorer pre-IE4 with the tree view turned off, but with the address bar (behind the little arrow) and preview mode.

    I like things that don’t try to be everything at the same time… and Dolphin fits the bill here.

    As for Krusader… Personally, I never really cared for NC clones, but used a few in my DOS days.

  • 2006-12-20 12:01 pm
    parentaladvisory

    As a KDe user, I have to say that my favourite filemanager is Konqueror, even though I don’t only use it as a filemnager.

    I love the ability to have a cpl of websites open in tabs, right next to a cpl of tabs with the most common places i go to in my filesystem.

    work’s flawlessly for me, and it have the ability to just fire up a console with the CWD when needed, lite unpacking something with rar, or burning a cd(that’s just cus’ I

    ve learned to use the cmdline for that ;) )

    All-in-all Konqueror offers a great deal of functionality, and costumization, like getting rid of all the unused buttons in iconbar or anything like that:)

    • 2006-12-20 12:21 pm
      korpenkraxar

      I agree. Running fluxbox with no icons, konqueror has long been my main desktop/file interface. sftp and smb integration, a real location-bar with the local/internet URL in simple text that you can actually select and copy (yes Nautilus I’m looking at you!), pressing F4 to open a terminal at the position you are viewing or even having a small integrated terminal at the bottom of the window… well, it all truly rocks.

      [EDIT]

      A great companion to any file manager is krename over at http://www.krename.net/, which, even if you know you grep, awk and sed well, make batch renaming of files a breeze. It has id3-tag support as well. A keeper.

      Edited 2006-12-20 12:29

  • 2006-12-20 1:46 pm
    deanlinkous

    you do know you can middle-click in nautilus if you want to kill the parent window…

    I always find that nautilus browses my network just fine.

    I prefer home to be home since it is….home after all. Don’t like a cluttered desktop!

    I do like tabs though but not that big cluttered tooldbar icon mess that is called konqueror

  • 2006-12-20 2:41 pm
    present_arms

    2 favourite file managers are konqueror (mainly because you can split the screen many times and for it’s excellent kio slaves) and mc when i don’t have a gui running ;)

    all the best

    alie

  • 2006-12-20 3:06 pm
    whendrik

    Painfully to say, it was a bit boring. I rather would be interested in a matrix with features and speed tests, not so special to just mention some graphical and text-based managers…

    Maybe it is not so far to mumble about this because i rather to everything command line and try to avoid any of these programs…

  • 2006-12-21 1:33 am
    jtfolden

    Are there any GTK/GNOME based file managers that offer a Finder/NeXT style Column view? I know there are one or two GNUStep efforts in this area but they don’t actually integrate well and tend to be lacking in a few areas.

    • 2006-12-21 8:55 pm
      cato_minor

      I was about to post the very same question. Surprising that column-view file managers weren’t mentioned neither in the article nor in the previous posts, and that they don’t exist even as an optional mode in one of the newer programs. There is FileCentral, but it’s alpha and apparently not actively developped:

      http://home.zhwin.ch/~bosshrap/projects/filecentral/

      Seems like GWorkspace.app is the only active project.

      On a sidenote, I always liked Konqueror for its “grandmother-friendliness”: it was one of the first who hid everything out of your homedirectory.

      Edited 2006-12-21 20:57

  • 2006-12-21 7:24 am
    Gooberslot

    Krusader looks interesting. I wonder how it compares to Total Commander from the Windows side.