How Do You Work With Your Files?

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Yet another chapter in our so called “operating system book of questions”, regards your every day file management.

From what can be seen, most of the operating systems nowadays come with some sort of basic file manager that displays your files as a big colorful salad of icons immune to configuration attempts, usually organized in 2 panes – the tree view and the folder content view, plus any combination of address buttons/bars/tools/etc. That isn’t exactly a bad thing, but just how useful it really is?

From what I could tell, the common user doesn’t really spend that much time organizing the content of files on his drive storage, except for the basic every day needs. Sooner or later an automated cleanup can be made to clear the junk, and some other software works with the files opening them, saving them, indexing them. But what if you just come to need to really work with your files, for instance getting the detailed insight on where is everything, searching by advanced criteria, complicated selections, multiple renaming, working with archives, configuration files and so forth. If that is your case, working with the integrated file manager will most probably throw  in a frustrating time wasting clicking frenzy, trying to sort them all out.

Some of you that got used to the “old days” – when pretty much everything was living in ms-dos or other console systems where any graphics were a real event – may remember just how practical and popular the “twin panel” file managers were. You had a basic visual display of your files, all the options at your finger tips, and pretty much no need for a mouse. The prototype of the so-called “orthodox” dual-pane file managing system was none other than the notorious Norton Commander, software that pretty much inspired a whole variety of other managers out there, such as the Midnight Commander for linux, and the Dos Navigator.

Long story short, what do we do today?

If your wrists are broken from all that mouse clicking and your eyes tired and unable to see the “forest” from the directory “trees” any longer, we strongly suggest you start looking through a set of goodies to make your life easier.

Any huge set of user opinions and votes out there can tell you what the top pick of file management system would be at the moment.

The modern-day proud successor of the Norton Commander genome, calls itself Total Commander.

This ingenuous piece of programming pretty much does it all, including the kitchen sink. You have an infinite set of configuration options via menus or direct editing of the configuration files, you have the big variety of hotkeys for anything, in the same inherited style (F5 – Copy, F6 – Rename/Move, etc). You have a wide array of plugins available for packing, viewing, undelete, extfs access, viewers and so forth, ftp client, local network browsing, file operation queue, portable configuration options, file encoding, checksum calculation, and so on and so forth – everything one could ever need. All of this in packed a tiny package, fast uncluttered interface and simply a clean and functional construction.

I know this software for many years, and I know a great deal of people using it, as well as the reviews and polls from the net. I can’t remember ever hearing someone say “Commander blows, I’d rather have something else”.

The Only downside to this program is that it’s not freeware.

So then what?

Well, there are some free alternatives out there you could also use in a corporate environment. Wikipedia and the web offers comparison and extended lists, and the best way to find the right choice is to actually try them by  yourself. I’m just here to narrow it down a little, and highlight a few top picks.

My first choice would be a little something called “Unreal Commander“. I’ve been watching this one for some time, and I do believe that  it’s growing into a nice piece of software, closing in the total commander functionality plus some extras. I will stick to the essentials since software reviews are available but the choice here is made by actually working and getting the feel of the program in order to decide.

Unreal Commander (UC) has pretty much the same standard function keys Total Commander (TC) does, also supports common packer and lister plugins (wcx, vlx). The overall interface feel may seem a bit sluggish on xp but you may try to turn off unnecessary transparencies and effects from the configuration menu and you won’t have that much issue there. However, file operations such as copy/move seem to be snappier than with TC, especially since TC was slower with lots of small files than xp’s native copy system. UC also has ftp, LAN browser, the works, and get this – symlink creation.

Unreal Commander offers automatic free licensing system both for corporate and personal use.

If for some reason you disagree with Unreal Commander (perhaps because it only runs on Windows OS), then you might try  muCommander – a simple and effective choice that runs on basically anything with java. muCommander is not over-featured, but it is GPL Free, lightweight and gets the job done. “mu” supports virtual file systems such as ftp, archive management and so forth, coming even with a nice personal command console with easy copy/paste interface instead of opening some dos-like consoles out there such as the one Windows uses.

Another java-based multi-platform manager goes by the name “Advanced Explorer“, holding simple functions, image viewer and so forth, together with “Double Commander” which is also a nice usable file manager in that manner.

The world of Linux users also has a twin-panel manager named Krusader (for KDE), making it a nice addition to the system.

The long list also contains names such as Free Commander, Q-Dir which brings a very interesting approach to file management with its multi-panel views and tiny program package, Gekko Manager, and last but certainly not least, NexusFile, bringing a dark stylish approach to your file views.

Nexus is actually very comfortable, snappy and shows a lot of promise besides its good looks, decent set of functions and such. However, the first reflex is to dive in it using the standard Commander-like keys, but that only brings you to a hard impact with a totally different key layout as you can see little from the image. If you have the patience to reconfigure it to fit your needs, it can be done from the configuration file.. but it can be overkill. Nevertheless, I liked the feeling of the program overall.

The question remains: What do You choose? Feel free to comment !