Known to be the subject of many files (most of them classified), Jonni Bidwell is here to show you how to manage yours…

Jonni Bidwell

Jonni Bidwell

His co-workers have only seen him by video link and have been unable to pinpoint his location

HOW WE TESTED…

We tried each file manager in Gnome (running on Ubuntu 20.04) and KDE Plasma running on an up-to-date Arch Linux. You may not want to install Krusader on Gnome, and you may not want to use a terminal file manager at all. But we did a variety of tasks in all of these settings. Searching on our disorganised drives for files, connecting to network servers we didn’t know were still working in the Future Towers basement… all manner of things that only foolhardy file wranglers would dare.

We also hunted around for common gripes and remedies, had a long look at Github issues for each project, and even prepared a short quiz on each candidate’s keyboard shortcuts (which we duly failed). Of course, we also did all of the everyday housekeeping that makes up the vast majority of most people’s file manager usage, and hopefully we came to some conclusions that will in some way help most people.

The major desktops all have their own file managers. Gnome has Files (formerly Nautilus), Mint has Nemo, MATE has Caja. These are all excellent at doing bread-and-butter file management, and all have their own unique features, including file labelling, batch renaming, metadata editing, and searches that integrate with the desktop’s indexing.

We could compare those, or include them, but then to one degree or another the comparison boils down to desktop philosophy. No one’s going to choose a desktop based solely on its file manager, and no one’s going to install, for example, Files on KDE (because despite dragging in a bunch of Gnome libraries it won’t work quite the same). So here we’ll round up file managers that aren’t beholden (beyond perhaps requiring one of GTK or Qt) to a particular desktop.

Be that as it may, we’ve included Dolphin (which historically wins these comparisons) and as we’ll see, can work just fine outside of KDE. We’ve chosen ones that are still actively developed, and we’ve got a mix of orthodox file managers (OFMs, having a dual column layout), classic ones (with a directory tree on the left) and hybrids. Despite this, we look forward to hearing what we should and should not have included.

Features

Why these candidates stand out from the file management mob.

Midnight Commander can, though it requires making odd- looking URI link such as ftp://user@remotehost, to connect to FTP and Samba shares. It can also do SFTP, or the slightly lighter FISH protocol. Indeed the latter was written specifically for Midnight Commander. Krusader adds NFS and WebDAV (for Nextcloud, say), but this is cheating slightly since it does so (like Dolphin) through KDE’s I/O “slaves”. If you add the Google Drive slave and add a Google account in the desktop, then you can access your drive manually in Krusader using the gdrive:// URI, but this option doesn’t appear in the connection dialog. Dolphin can do all of that too. In addition, it has a Network section in its bookmarks, which enables you to browse MTP devices and Windows networks.

Midnight Commander’s User menu makes it possible to compress files and directories in a number of ways, and further operations can be added (see later). There’s a neat, but not very well-documented Panelize feature, which enables a panel to be populated with either the results of a search or the output of a program, so that the returned files can be worked on individually. 4panel has a mount menu that can mount network shares and ISO images. Ranger can preview text files in a separate column (or open them in your favourite text editor). Ranger aims for minimalism, recognising that other tools (such as the w3m console browser, an image viewer, and Atool for handling archives) already provide the most requested features and speed.