Software : In Depth: Best Linux file manager: 6 reviewed and rated |
| In Depth: Best Linux file manager: 6 reviewed and rated Posted: 17 Apr 2011 04:00 AM PDT  The number of files stored on the average desktop PC keeps increasing. Our needs change as we do, and every year we depend more on digital documents while our storage devices get bigger to keep pace. In short, the way we proudly arranged our files just a few years ago has become obsolete. The upshot is that you not only need an efficient assistant for the common task of dealing with your files, but also a workhorse for the next time you want to do some serious cleaning. This is why, even in these times of social desktops and cloud computing, file managers remain relevant. The litmus test for any file manager, then, is its ability to manage large numbers of files efficiently, and this is one of the two main criteria for the applications in this roundup. Our other primary concern is advocacy. Could each file manager here help convince inexperienced Linux users that the OS can be either familiar and easy to use, or different in that it's much more flexible than what they've previously experienced? As such, we've given lots of space to the file managers of popular and novice-friendly desktop environments. However, we've also included applications that are in most Linux live CDs for low-end systems, plus a couple of outsiders to encompass the richness of the Linux ecosystem. Of course, we could have further demonstrated this by including equally valid programs such as Midnight Commander or EmelFM2, but these have all already been covered in relatively recent LXF articles and so we've chosen to pass over them here. Nautilus
Fire up Nautilus in Fedora 14 and by default you'll see a multi-pane affair with a tree on the left, some icons along the top and plenty of space reserved for viewing files. This is known as Browser mode. The alternative view is Spatial mode, which opens a window for each folder you access - almost as if each was a physical file. You can set whichever you prefer as the default using the app's Preferences menu. Your options don't stop there, though - Nautilus can display directory contents in List, Icons or Compact view, accessible via a drop-down menu. You're also able to choose between single- or double-clicking to open a file, while thumbnails can be toggled off or on, and enlarged. To zoom in or out, click on the two small buttons to the sides of the current zoom level. Each click corresponds to a 50% variation, but we'd prefer a finer degree of granularity. What's more, you can have additional views of several folders all in one Nautilus window. To open a new pane just select View > Extra Pane. In our default Browser view, Nautilus shows the current directory with breadcrumbs - that is, a list of the path to the current directory you can use to retrace your steps. Right-clicking these Nautilus enables you to choose whether to move there or open that folder in a separate window or tab. Other buttons in the top bar enable you to move through recently visited folders, or go up one level in the filesystem. Notably, whether files are local or remote makes little difference, since Nautilus can connect to FTP, WebDAV, SSH servers and Windows shares. You can also save frequently visited folders as bookmarks. The small arrow-like symbol at the right-hand end of the toolbar activates Nautilus's search functionality. With this, you can define which kind of files it should look for, and where. You can even name and bookmark a search as if it were a normal folder. To aid you in finding files at a glance, Nautilus can attach Notes and Emblems - little pictures added to a file's icon - to your files. To add a Note, right-click a file, select Properties, go to the Notes tab, type whatever you want and click Save. That text will then be visible in the left pane whenever you're in Notes Display mode. In the case of Emblems, you can use them as visual reminders of the purpose or nature of each file. For example, you can add the Important Emblem to crucial files. If the predefined options here don't suit your needs, you can create your own: go to Edit > Background And Emblems, then click Emblems and Add A New Emblem. Unfortunately, there's no obvious way to use Emblems as search criteria. Finally, Nautilus opens a context-sensitive menu when you select a file or folder. This menu always has a Send To entry, which you can use to send files via instant messaging or email, to DVDs, or to compression programs. A simple way to extend Nautilus's capabilities is to add your own actions to this menu. A Nautilus action is simply an executable shell script placed in a special directory, normally $HOME/.gnome2/nautilusscripts/. Its contents are shown in the Scripts submenu. When you select one, Nautilus will run it with the selected files as parameters. There are already plenty of these scripts online: find them at http://g-scripts.sourceforge.net. Verdict Version: 2.32.2.1 Nautilus is a great tool. Its interface has improved greatly with age too. Rating: 8/10 Dolphin
Dolphin is the official file manager of the KDE desktop. Its standard configuration gives the user a left-hand panel listing Places, with Home, Network, Root and Trash as the defaults. Meanwhile, the main area shows the contents of the current directory as Icons, Columns, or by Details. The latter resembles the listing you'd get in a terminal window. When you're using it, you can show or hide the hierarchy of your directory tree with the Expandable Folders option. The Split button turns on or off a two-pane layout, or you can open several tabs. If you're ever stuck as to what a button does, pressing Shift+F1 when the cursor is over it provides a handy tooltip. As is standard, thumbnails are available. Dolphin's zoom function is harder to notice than Nautilus's: it's just a tiny slider in the bottom right corner. However, it also works better, in that you can set it to any value you want within the pre-defined range. With View > Location, you can set the location bar in Breadcrumb or Editable Box mode. Almost all shortcuts in Dolphin are configurable, as is the priority of file-sorting criteria. Dolphin also has panels for Information and Folders, and an integrated terminal. Panels can be maximised, minimised or detached from the main Dolphin window by clicking on the small diamond button in their corner. The Information panel shows a preview of whatever you've selected in the main area. It's also possibly the most powerful part of Dolphin, because it enables you to associate comments, ratings and tags to each file or folder in the manager (or, rather, Nepomuk) and displays whatever you've previously entered. The mechanism is similar to the Digikam picture manager. Dolphin just generalises that approach and the interface. It can be timeconsuming, but the reward is worth it if you have lots of files. When it comes to finding files, Dolphin's search capabilities are powerful, but the way they're presented can confuse first-time users. There are two different search functions, but the distinction isn't as evident as it should be. The first interface is the box you get when you press Ctrl+F or select Tools > Find File. The other is the small input field that appears at the right-hand end of the toolbar if you choose Settings > Toolbars Shown. The Find File box enables you to search in the traditional Unix sense: according to file names, content if they're text, or properties such as size or modification date. The other interface does something quite different. You can still refine results by setting limits on file sizes or modification dates. However, this toolbar queries the Nepomuk database. If you activate its indexer, it also looks at file contents, but otherwise it only returns files whose tags or comments match what you've typed in their Information box. As with Nautilus, you can save search queries as bookmarks and Dolphin also has a configurable contextual menu.
Besides its support for file information, the other strength of Dolphin is that there are interesting add-ons of all varieties, including a Dropbox interface, making DVDs of picture galleries with Kdenlive and converting scanned text to plain text format with Tesseract. Verdict Version: 1.5 Dolphin's interface is tidy, but it's packed with features Rating: 9/10 4Pane
This multi-pane, list-based file manager was designed to put speed before visual effects. Its name comes from the fact that the default configuration displays two identical pairs of panes. Each of these couples consists of a directory tree view and a detailed list of files. You can, however, add or remove panes as you wish, use tabs and store bookmarks too. The first time you start 4Pane, a wizard looks at your system to create a basic configuration, or enables you to import an existing one. Once you've arranged 4Pane as you please, you can save that setup as a template. Shortcuts are available and configurable for most functions. Indeed, as 4Pane's 'Help for people who don't read manuals' says: "Just about everything is configurable, mainly from the Options > Configure 4Pane menu and [by] pressing F1 you'll get context-sensitive help…" The interface contains buttons or menus to mount and unmount drives or partitions, manage archives and go back to recently visited folders. Besides this, 4Pane supports mass renaming or duplication of files, and can handle removable drives, NFS or Samba shares. Following the detailed instructions in the full user manual, 4Pane can also be extended with user-defined tools. To get an idea of what's available, looking in the Tools menu displays the ones supplied with 4Pane: find, grep and locate. 4Pane even features an integrated terminal. Selecting View > Show Terminal Emulator opens it. It isn't fully featured, since you can't use su, sudo or escape sequences. However, pipes, redirection and command histories are supported, so it can save you time, especially if you want to work half with the mouse and half at the prompt. Verdict Version: 0.8.0 4Pane is spartan, but fast and efficient when moving lots of files. Rating: 7/10 Thunar
Thunar is the default file manager of the Xfce4 desktop environment. It's simple, but well designed, fast and easy to use. The top most menu contains nothing more than File, Edit, View and Go entries. Bookmarks and mounted drives are shown in the left pane as icons or in a tree view, while the current directory's displayed either with breadcrumbs in Thunar's Pathbar style, or in an editable text box in its Toolbar style. The latter also adds Up, Back and Home buttons, which work just like those in Nautilus. Another similarity between the two is the choice between detailed icons, a compact list or a detailed list as views. An Open Terminal Here command is always available in the main contextual menu. The Send To option in the same menu can create a desktop link for the selected file, attach it to an email, or copy it to other drives or Bluetooth devices. The last option in the pop-up menu is a bulk renamer, which you can also activate by pressing F2 or choosing Edit > Rename... from the main menu. With this, you can add, remove or replace characters in the names of previously selected files, or add dates or progressive numbers to them. Extra renaming options are available for certain filetypes with the right plugins - you'll find a list of Action add-ons here. Creating your own is easy too. If you select Edit > Configure Custom Actions and then click the plus sign, you'll get a panel with two tabs. The first tells Thunar how to associate a generic program to a new menu entry. The second defines Appearance Conditions: the types of files to which Thunar should associate that menu entry. Verdict Version: 1.0.2 Friendly and fast: Thunar is perfect for novice users on limited systems Rating: 8/10 Rox-Filer
The Rox-Filer is only a part of Rox, a desktop environment inspired by the RISC (reduced instruction set computing) strategy. The Filer window has only a few buttons. Three are shortcuts to your bookmarks, your home directory and parent directory. Others sort, hide or show files or display thumbnails instead of icons. You can also colour files based on their type. Rox-Filer has almost all the functions of other file managers, it just puts them in a different place: namely, a pop-up menu activated by the right mouse button. From it, you can open a terminal or a location bar, search for files (with regular expressions), activate the List or Icon views and more. A Next Click submenu even enables you to decide what the next action will be before telling Filer which file or folder should be the object of said action. The default terminal here is Xterm, but you can change it if you wish. The Rox desktop uses the 0install system, which puts programs in self-contained application directories. Installing such programs is as simple as copying a folder wherever you want, which is what we did with Filer. A full manual is also provided in HTML format and available online. However, when you click the LIFESAVER icon (at least in Fedora 14), Filer doesn't open its manual pages in a browser, only the folder in which they were copied. Using Filer is an intriguing experience. It's fast and flexible, with a refreshingly different look. Sometimes you feel like you've gone back 10 years, but in a good way - offering a glimpse of what Linux might have become if it had taken a different path. While it has all the necessary functions, though, be warned that it does take some effort on your part to make all of them usable. Verdict Version: 1.5 Rox-Filer is pretty bare but powerful and pleasingly fast: try it! Rating: 7/10 PcManFM
PcManFM can probably be considered the simplest and least intimidating file manager in these pages. The toolbar beneath the main menu only has five buttons: ones for the previous and next folder, links to parent and home directories, and one to open a new tab. In addition, there's the location bar and a small arrow that opens a list of recently visited folders. The left-hand pane is divided in two parts: graphic versions of the Go and Bookmarks top menus. The Go part of this pane contains shortcuts to some predefined locations. The default ones are your home directory, Desktop folder, Trash and an Applications folder, which enables you launch all the applications used to manage the Gnome System settings. In general, the look and feel of PcManFM reminds us of a much simplified version of Nautilus, with a Thunar-like style, and that's a compliment. These are only some of the reasons why PcManFM was used in LXDE, the Light Desktop Environment. This program is fast and lightweight, but still gives the user tabbed browsing, and four view modes: Icon, Thumbnail, List or Compact. It's also capable of volume management and you can drag and drop across tabs. Thumbnails are present for image files, plus there are bookmarks and handling of filenames with encoding other than UTF-8. The main limitations of this app are that there's no search interface and the Tools menu only provides two choices: open a terminal in the current folder (F4) or as the root user. There are no direct links to any documentation, but the interface is so simple that this isn't much of a problem. Verdict Version: 0.9.9 Speed and simplicity in an attractive package, but it lacks documentation Rating: 7/10 The best Linux file manager is... Dolphin 9/10
All the file managers presented here perform well on the medium- to high-end desktop computers that are common these days. If you're looking for something simple to use on a machine with limited capabilities, though, both Thunar and PcManFM are good choices. If simplicity and familiarity aren't essential, try Rox- Filer for a novel experience, or 4Pane if you have to move or analyse lots of non-graphical files with find and grep. In general, however, a complete file manager that's suitable for the majority of users must offer something more than these applications. Heavy file management requires a few key features, such as blending a graphical interface and quick command line into one app as seamlessly as possible. The former is useful to quickly figure out if that bunch of JPEG files with impenetrable names are your holiday snaps or sales forecast diagrams. The latter is handy for those moments where you'll need more flexibility, automation or speed than a GUI-only application could provide. Sure, you can run a file manager in one window and a terminal in another, but the closer they are to hand, the faster you'll work. Other important features are direct support for search (we love find, but it's not for every circumstance) and extensibility. That's why we're happy to declare Dolphin the winner of this roundup, with Nautilus coming a close second. Dolphin is a very good mix of all the features we just mentioned, and then some. The in-window terminal and integration with Nepomuk for semantic searches are major advantages, and while Nautilus's Emblems system is certainly handy, we find it less flexible than the file information data that Nepomuk can handle. Both are great apps, though. Looking at them side by side, we have only one regret: why don't they share file metadata and at least their simplest extensions? In a perfect world, it would be great, for example, if Nautilus could read Nepomuk tags entered from Dolphin, or if the KDE file manager could automatically find and use Nautilus shell scripts. |
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