Two pane file manager

[Mateusz Łoskot]

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Benedikt Meurer wrote:
> 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.

Hmm, I'd not estimate it this way :-)

>> 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€.

Simply, I have some my own "best practice" of how I browse my box.
Total Commander + GnuWin32 tools + good terminal is that what I see
perfect on Windows.
It provides fast, GUI based navigation together with command line
capabilities. e.g. you can run command like ls -la > mylist in the
command line input box at the bottom and it will work on current dir.
Not to mention running terminal this way will
take you to this directory in opened terminal window.
There are many situation where this model if well working.

>> 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%.

I always thought that Linux is Linux but not a clone of Windows and the
main target audience is Linux Community.
But it seems I'm in a very small group of people thinking that way :)

>> 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.

I understand it well.
OK, so I see the only option for now is to try to write some 2-panes
terminal and see if people will like it.
I like Thunard design and architecture so I'll try to use Thunar code if
its Authors don't mind :-)

> 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.

Yes, but I don't like it :(
It's GNOME Commander but I'm looking for GTK+ based commander without
dependencies from GNOME.

Cheers
- --
Mateusz Łoskot
http://mateusz.loskot.net
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