Two pane file manager

[Benedikt Meurer]

Mateusz Łoskot wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> As I see, both GNOME with Nautilus and Xfce with Thunar
> face the Windows Explorer approach - single pane + tree (or shortcuts).
> There were even a long discussion on the Nautilus mailing list about
> which file manager layout is more usable but Nautilus developers stated
> Windows Explorer-like is FM is best.
> 
> I'd say, I don't agree and I know more people that prefer to use Total
> Commander (or Midnight Commander on Unix) than Windows Explorer.
> Simply, every keyboard fun prefer two panes because it saves him from
> clicking too much.

There's one important point that people often forget here: Windows
Explorer is used by most probably every Windows user on earth. Only very
few Windows users (I'd guess less than 0.5%) will ever try to use a
different file manager (or even a different desktop shell) on Windows.
So what do we learned from this? Microsofts file manager is not perfect
(< 100% coverage), but its usable for > 99.5% of all users. The
remaining 0.5% will most probably be able to find an alternative.

> I'm a bit surprised why there is no well working clone of Midnight/Total
> Commander on Linux. I always thought Linux users prefer using keyboard
> than mouse :-)

Why bother a file manager then? Just grab yourself a good terminal
emulator, a nice shell and a window manager with good keyboard
navigation features (i.e. Terminal, zsh, xfwm4) and you're done. Just my
0.02€.

> I'd just ask if there is any interest of having
> two pane based file manager like the Total Commander for Windows?
> May be Thunar could be provide two configurable layouts with common
> engine inside?
> I propose it to Nautilus DevTeam but it didn't meet a big interest.

This is easy to explain: Nautilus, just like Thunar, is targetting the
99.5%, not the 0.5%.

> What's an opinion of XFCE/Thunar developers and users regarding two pane
> file manager?

This was asked on thunar-dev some time ago already. You can of course
use the thunar libraries to write your own two pane file manager,
shouldn't be that hard (you should be able to c&p a lot of classes from
Thunar), but for the first Thunar release, there's a definite "no" to
two pane mode, as it simply doesn't fit into the whole picture at all.

> Cheers

Benedikt

PS: Have you tried GNOME Commander (dunno if that project is still
maintained)? It's probably not as polished as Nautilus/Thunar, but it
does the two pane mode.