Summary

Management of the files and folders in Linux is easy and simple 🙂 and for that we have multiple options to select, i.e. to say file manager. Let’s find out applications that you can install on Fedora to manage the task.

Institution

One of the operations that are performed frequently by both system administrator and end users on any operating systems is files and folders management. During daily work each user has to carry out operations like identification, classification, elimination and modification of files and folders. For this reason it is always good to rely on simple and streamlined file manager in order to manage files in the most easy and quick way as possible.

Most Linux users are not aware of the wide range of file manager available, and even don’t know the full functionality they offer. For an example, we will take a reference of Fedora – several file managers are available for this OS such as Midnight Commander, Konqueror, Dolphin, Krusader, Nautilus, Thunar, PCManFM and XFE.

Opensource.com has published an article that briefly examines each file manager and compares some of the key features. Here is the review of Opensource.com.

1) Dolphin – Default File Manager in Fedora

Like most of Linux distributions Fedora also has a default file manager that is currently Dolphin. On the Linux desktop an icon is usually present that represents the home directory tree. Just click on that icon to access the file manager, which is thus started from the position PWD (present working directory). In versions of Fedora using KDE 4.1 or higher, the home icon is located in the Desktop Folder along with Trash Icon.

In KDE the default file manager can be changed in System Settings / Default Application / File Manager.

2) Midnight Commander

Midnight Commander is a command line interface – CLI. It is particularly useful when a GUI is not available, but may possibly be used also as a file manager in primary terminal session if you are using a graphical interface. It can be used with any common shell and remote terminals through SSH.

To start Midnight Commander from the CLI, you just need to enter command MC. The user interface is divided into two panels and each shows the contents of a directory. At the top of each pane displays the name of the current directory. Navigation can be done with the arrow keys, Tab and Enter.

The top of the interface displays a menu bar from which you can access the configuration settings of the file manager. The bottom provides information about the file or directory highlighted.

3) Krusader

Krusader is a file manager with Linux UI similarities to the previous application. The difference consists in the fact that it is two panels, but non-text graphics. This means that in addition to allowing the keyboard navigation, it also allows the navigation with a mouse or trackball.

Therefore, it has an interface with two panels, each containing two different directories. The detailed view displays over the file icon and the name, the size, date last modified the owner and permissions. Top of the page there is a menu that contains all the configuration items. In the lower part of the page a command line is present.

Krusader automatically saves the positions at the end in order to propose them to restart.

In the second part we will see some more file managers to try. Stay tuned…