File Manager of the Year
 

What is your file manager of choice?

--jeremy

SpaceFM

Addicted to rox-filer. Though I do like spacefm and Xfe. If out of X, I use ranger.

i have no vote to cast here.
file managers have always been a problematic issue.
i really like thunar, but for many years tumbler (thunar's thumbnailer) has a bug that makes it use resources uncontrollably.
pcmanfm is good and getting better, but i have problems with gvfs integration (mtp mostly) and some other minor annoyances.
spacefm is very good, too, but...
more and more often i choose to simply open a terminal to copy files and such.

well, i am interested in the result and other people's comments.

GNOME Files because it always correctly works with Android smartphones and other external devices while Dolphin and some other file managers sometimes cannot recognize them "out of the box".

Midnight Commander will always win for me, despite its inability to display thumbnails for images and videos.

On what distro? I recently got a new Android phone, and pcmanfm on Debian Stable (Jessie) works just fine for MTP.

Dolphin's so far so good.

Regards.

actually PCmanFM-Qt

on archlinux.
it works, but is quirky with mtp & my kitkat phone (sometimes doesn't react anymore, or copying fails halfway through...).
pcmanfm had some other quirks, too: sshfs (seldom now, there was a fix that was with fuse) and generally copying to/from external locations is usually much faster with command line, but i guess that's just normal...

Same here. My last 3 Android phones never worked 100 with Linux Mint 17.2 and for that matter Slackware 13.0 to Slackware -current as it is. MTP is flacky as it gets. The operations are so slow that my pet snail "jumbo" laughs on it. Oh and phone gets disconnected on its own and reappears.

Regards.

Krusader. The most comprehensive file manager

Although I voted for MC, I think there's still lots of improvements that can be made, it seems to have stopped in time. For example, select a file in MC, press F2, available options: "Edit a bug report and send it to root", "Strip headers from current newsarticle"... Well, it could try detecting the file type like Thunar does (and I believe most other file managers do) and only show what is appropriate. Too many options shown at the wrong time make me really use MC only for browsing directories, and when I want to do any action, I press Ctrl+O and do it from the shell.

Also Sunflower (http://github.com/MeanEYE/Sunflower) would have been nice.

Sunflower has been added.

--jeremy

Ranger w/Rifle

voted dolphin because of features...but spacefm is great as well.

Only with mc i can use any external shell command like this:

cp %s %D

(copy all selected entries (or the entry under the cursor if nothing is selected) (%s) from the active dir to the other dir (%D))

Haven't yet seen any other FM with that kind of commandline power. And without that, it would be like a cake without the proverbial icing. Hell, it wouldn't even be a real cake!

I simply depend on mc, no matter how cool & fancy any other FM might be. I'd love to use Krusader, Sunflower etc., but that's simply not an option for me. No true shell power there.

Dolphin, due to its numerous features and ease of use. Although, as a Xfce user, I usually use Thunar. I occasionally use Konqueror as an FTP client.

I highly recommend ranger to anyone who hasn't tried it. Truly beautiful program. I quickly became attached to it.

For the record, ranger implements basically the same thing: %f for the file under the cursor, %s for the selected file(s), %c for the file(s) on the clipboard (whatever you last deleted or copied), and %d for the active dir. (I think vifm as well does something similar, though I might be wrong.)

When I'm just shuffling files, though, I do "yy"/"dd" to copy/delete selection (or the entry under the cursor if nothing is selected), "gt" to switch tab, and "pp" to paste. For me, that is perfection :)

wow, still maintained!
i tried this some 1-2 years ago, and it was very beta-ish.
trying again now.

Alright, another shell-based FM i didn't know about. You got me there, i'm here to admit. But i'd prefer Krusader combined with the above shell power. That would be the thing. But for now, mc is doing just fine. And i'm willing to bet that mc will receive many, many votes.

Certainly. If you're happy enough with mc, that's what matters. My intention wasn't to compare ranger to mc, just to chip in some seemingly relevant info that I happen to have. Hope you find your graphical FM with advanced shell integration one day!

Dolphin. It's very fast and feature rich.

Wow, that looks perfect for me. Thanks for the recommendation.

One of the great things about these annual awards is discovering programs that I haven't used before.

I tried Ranger. It has great UX, but its code quality is awful and one of its main features, video previews, doesn't work reliably for me.

How did I find out the first part? By trying to find out why the second part was happening (without success).

My vote this year was for MC. I have no second thoughts.

I voted spacefm since I am mostly using just shell or rover (File browser, not manager) and when I do need a file manager I reach for spacefm. Ranger and mc are cool as well, but they don't fit my use case as much.

4pane would of been another worth including even though I doubt many people know about it.

Have you tried fzf?

No, first I have heard of it, doesn't seem to be a slackbuild for it yet, seems interesting though!

Hi Dugan, I'm glad you tried it out. As someone who barely programs, I don't really know how to judge the programs I use based on code quality. Since I use ranger a LOT, though, (even as root), such an indictment does sound worrisome. If you wouldn't mind explaining a bit (and if this isn't too off topic), what is so bad about the ranger code, compared to mc? Do you think it should matter to someone like me, who probably won't be hacking into the code much? I sure like ranger's UX, and I've personally encountered very few bugs over several years. But I've also not really spent much time using mc yet.

I had no idea video previews were a thing, actually.

I have never looked at mc's code. One thing that's bad about Ranger's code is the multiple instances of:

Those should be either:

Or

Or Any of those three would have been better.

Keep in mind that I program in Python for a living.

Hmm ok, thanks. I think I can see why that's bad practice: it will mask actual errors that aren't just the one he's expecting, making it hard to debug.

Dolphin. If a file manager doesn't have split view, I don't even consider it. I used to use DirWork extensively on the Amiga.

Dolphin no contest.

Bash.

OMG that's right...

libc FTW! It might require some more typing (and sometimes compiling before executing), but it can do everything, i.e., far more than any other file manager known to man. Most versatile and already installed everywhere. :cool:

Dolphin has won the title for five straight years, with Thunar coming in second. I use and like them both.

I just got around to trying this. It's amazing once you set $ROVER_OPEN to xdg-open.

I plan to vote for vifm this year, but rover is a very nice complement to it.