What Is Your Favourite Linux File Manager? Here are a few of my opinions.

[rob86 2]

I've tried a few File Managers on Linux in search of one to use as my primary one. I'll give a little information and my opinion on them. I haven't really used any of the for very long (aside from Thunar) so I might have overlooked something so don't start flaming me about how I don't know what I'm talking about. I don't claim to! It's just a casual post, not an authoritative review. I haven't had time to test out all the "advanced" features and config options of each either.Thunar:Xfce's/Xubuntu's default. It's fast for a modern looking File manager. Looks about like Nautilus, but less featured. Personally, it's big icon (even in detail mode), spread out look doesn't appeal to me (even after any some effort to customize it). I can't seem to see any way of accessing a 'history' of directories? Which seems like a huge missing feature to me, unless I'm missing it.Nautilus:Seems to be a more feature rich Thunar. It looks about the same, but has folding directories and is a bit easier to navigate with bookmarks. It's much slower starting than Thunar, unless it loads faster on GNOME (I forget). As it looks the same as Thunar, I don't like the looks of it.Midnight Commander:A command line file manager, looks relatively powerful and feature rich, takes a little more effort to learn and love since it's more different than anything else.. Looks kind of ugly, especially with the default colour scheme and colour settings of my Gnome Terminal. It's old school, command line look definitely wouldn't appeal to everyone. On the plus side, it's very fast, probably the fastest I've tried, and it supports command line commands (!!) (ls, cd .., cp, etc) which is excellent to me. Two window panes. No Drag /Drop. Not bad if you're in a terminal and don't want to leave it. Plus, you don't need to run X to use it. emelFM2:This is definitely one of my favourites. It's got quite a few useful buttons, but the interface doesn't look cluttered. The information is tightly packed in which means more on the screen at once. The GUI icons look great and modern, and it seems to be customizable (different icon sizes, etc..). It's got a mini terminal at the bottom for command line file managing. It's sleek look comes at a price, no thumbnails and no file icons (I don't think anyway). To me, this is a good thing, as I don't like icons. It colours the filenames a bit to separate file types, I'm not sure how much. I haven't checked out the config settings yet to see how customizable it is. At default, it doesn't colourize things like archives. Two window panes. Quite fast. Drag and drop!Worker: This was modeled after the immensely powerful Directory Opus available on Windows. While it doesn't really compare to dOpus (I don't think anything on linux can) it still looks like a strong contender for the most powerful file manager. To be honest, I haven't tried this much. It has a whole bunch of buttons (not all shown at once, you have to cycle the view) ranging from quick renaming (tolower, to upper), conversion , extension changing, image manipulation, archive tools. All of these buttons are CUSTOMIZABLE, you can program them do anything you want and add more if you need it. Very useful. It has two window panes like any good File Manager. It's fast. It doesn't have a very clean interface (buttons EVERYWHERE, the date and time, free ram..). It reminds me of a jet cockpit, with tons of information packed in everywhere. It's got three file listing modes, normal listing, image listing, and information listing. Image shows a preview of the file, information shows a bunch of information like access time on the side, pretty useful. It seems to have a relatively customizable layout, but will always retain it's not so pretty "old" style look, with no graphical icons. No drag and drop here either. Doesn't seem to have a command line, unless I'm missing it.Rox-Filer:Surprisingly good for such a speedy little file manager. It looks pretty good, though doesn't have all the buttons of the more powerful Emelfm or Worker. I literally just installed it, so I haven't checked out the options much. It has icons and thumbnails. I definitely do prefer it to Nautilus or Thunar though, no doubt about that. Conclusion:It's really hard to decide on a primary file manager. EmelFM2 seems to have a great balance between powerful features and a sleek, not too cluttered look. Midnight Commander and worker are powerful, but have the "airplane cockpit" look with as many buttons and information that will fit on the screen at a time. Some might like this look, some might hate it. I don't mind it. Rox-Filer would make an excellent default manager for a distro and in fact I think it does. It's fast, does mostly everything a basic user would need, and looks pretty decent. Nautilus is definitely the slowest of all of them from my testing, and nothing about it seems to make up for the slowness. If you need thumbnails and file type icons, Rox-Filer does it but faster and better looking (that's my opinion of course). Thunar is a relatively fast Nautilus-type, but it seems to be the most feature-less of the all. I can't recommend it for anyone unless they want the absolute simplest thing out there. I have strong negative opinions about the look of Nautilus, others might not agree with me and that's okay. I prefer a tightly packed, command line style listing of files and use small fonts for everything. On Nautilus, every line of file is separated by padding and I don't like it. I like file managers for power users**. I haven't tried things like connecting to FTP and remote locations yet with any of these, I'm not sure which supports this. The ability to use command line shell commands on a file manager is a feature I never had on Windows, and I'm finding it really useful and am starting to miss it on file managers that lack it.What do you think about file managers? Do you like Nautilus, the default Ubuntu file manager? Someone must, since it IS the default pre-loaded one.( ** Yes, I know, "power users" use the command line and shell commands. I've heard that said half a dozen times while asking for recommendations. I use bash all the time, but I also prefer a GUI once in a while, too!)

[The Simpleton 2]

To be honest I never bothered about which file manager I'm using. Maybe that's because I don't have to manage most of my files So I guess Nautilus is just fine for me right now. No complaints about it and no problems either. The other managers that you mentioned do sound interesting and I think it will be nice to compare them to Nautilus. Let's see what the others have to say about this....

Edited November 9, 2009 by The Simpleton (see edit history)

[rob86 2]

I'm really, really liking EmelFM2. The only problem is, I have a very old version of it and can't compile the newest version without an error!. The one in the Ubuntu repo is almost 2 years old!? It's like 4.0 and the newest is 6. Some of the things I mentioned about EmelFM2 above I found more about. You can customize the colours of the file types, which is good, but I wish it was pre-set like in the shell. I'm trying to find out what changed in the last two years to update my opinion. It's kind of stupid 'review'ing such an old version. The main reason I'm so picky about file managers is because I came from Dopus on windows. I never cared much about file managers until I tried Directory Opus. Then I realized, wow, what a difference it makes to have a good file manager. I could do things faster, and more efficiently. After switching to Ubuntu, I suffered from "file manager shock". Nautilus reminded me too much of Windows' default and is very limiting after what I was used to. I kept wanting to do things that Nautilus couldn't do. I don't want to go back to that. Nautilus is probably a good choice for Ubuntu's default file manager since it fits the simple "it just works" philosophy, but it's not for me.

Edited November 9, 2009 by rob86 (see edit history)

[truefusion 3]

The first two on your list i have tried out, and i personally prefer Thunar over Nautilus. The rest on your list i have not tried out and have only heard of rox-filer, which is originally for the ROX desktop environment. The others i have tried out which are not listed are Dolphin and PCManFM. Dolphin contains a lot of features that Thunar and Nautilus may never have, but it is not as fast starting up as Thunar and Nautilus is and may appear a bit cluttered. Also, concerning Thunar's big icons, believe it or not, i only remember experiencing those big icons in GNOME. I was actually a bit surprised at their size when i saw them so big.Why i prefer Thunar over Nautilus is because it has better support for opening files with other applications, it has features already present (like "Open terminal here") that would normally require installing those features separately if i were using Nautilus, and, though a small reason, Thunar looks better than Nautilus. The only thing i wish it had that Nautilus already has is tabbed browsing. PCManFM is okay; it has a terminal emulator, shortcuts, DBUS and HAL support (like most popular file managers), but it is still a bit immature.Dolphin is a pretty convenient file manager. Before KDE4, i was using Konqueror as a file manager, but Dolphin has more file management features than Konqueror does. Dolphin has tabbed browsing, built-in konsole support (which it loads in its own dock widget), and a lot of file management features. I like the fact that i don't have to cut and paste files just to move them, or copy and paste just to copy them. Merely right-clicking on the file/folder and hovering over "Move to" or "Copy to" and it'll provided a menu of folder locations to where to move or copy the file to. The only downside to this is if one folder has a lot of sub-directories and you have a small screen resolution.But even with all the features Dolphin brings, i would still pick Thunar over it. KDE applications require a few daemons to be ran in order to use the applications. I would prefer not to have those daemons running in the background. I did attempt to make my own file manager, but that project is currently postponed, and i don't know if i'll pick it up again. But i'll take a look at emelFM2.

[rob86 2]

I too preferred Thunar over Nautilus because of speed mostly. Nautilus looks almost exactly the same as Thunar for me, the only differences being folding directories and a few more things in the Places sidebar. Even the toolbars are pretty much the same, I can hardly tell them apart, but it might be my desktop environment.EmelFM2 is designed to look and work like Norton Commander, which I haven't used myself. Another file manager which I haven't tried is called Gnome Commander. It has some interesting features like remote connection and looks like EmelFM2 with icons (and a default blue background). It is noticeably slower and less responsive than EmelFM2 on my computer though. emelFM has an optional thumbnail viewing plugin , which is a somewhat handy thing missing from the default install and has to be downloaded separately. I seem to be having trouble colourizing file types as of the latest version. I had no problems in 4.? but in 6.2 it doesn't seem to work. I asked about it on their mailing list, and am awaiting a reply. This is my only gripe so far with it.I'm finding emelFM2 hard to beat for my needs, it has a great balance of speed, clean interface, functionality it seems to be customizable. The toolbar icons can be made tiny and compact too. I like it when icons take up little space.

[truefusion 3]

After trying out emelFM2, i feel the structure is a bit too complicated and it kind of feels like i'm working in an FTP program. You could hide one of the columns, but that ruins the point for certain features. Its interface seems very customizable, but a bit too complicated for me.