I stumbled through this file manager called Double Commander. It's not the first one I was testing in the past. If you remember, last year I have actually published an article which showed another free file manager based on tabbed approach. Today I'll show you another free utility, a file manager which might be useful when you doing a lot of copy-paste or cut-paste operations. It's Open source software which is cross-platform. Available for Mac, Windows and Linux.
The program presents itself with two directories side by side, when started. Usually when you start Windows explorer you see only single directory and you must start second instance to do a copy/cut operation. With Double Commander you get the two tabs where you can drag files/folders in between easily.
In addition Double Commander shows directly the configured network drives and local drives at the toolbar. It allows quickly switch to desired disk or network drive on each side.
The first start however does not look very clean but quick look at the configuration options allows keeping strict minimum in order to have clean and neat view of the possibilities. So in my case I just went to menu Configurations > Options > Layout and unchecked the Show drives list button, Show free space indicator and Show folder tabs.
The colors of fonts and folders can be changed. You can even make some folders dissapear from the UI if you don't using them, in order not to accidentally copy some files in those. There is a built-in file viewer and file archiver. Many keyboard shortcuts can be found in the online help. The configuration options are quite endless… Really like this program.
Double Commander – the Features:
- All operations work in the background with threading operations support
- Tabbed panels interface
- Custom toolbar with buttons to launch external programs or internal menu commands
- Multi-rename tool
- Customizable columns
- Built-in file viewer (F3) to view files of ANY SIZE in hexadecimal, binary or text format
- Built-in text editor (F4) with syntax highlighting
- Archives are handled like subdirectories. You can easily copy files to and from the archive. Supports following types: ZIP, TAR GZ, TGZ, BZ2, RPM, CPIO, DEB, RAR
- Extended search function with full text search in any files
- Supports WCX, WLX, WDX and WFX plugins from Total Commander (also supports own DSX plugin format)
- Operations log
Thoughts.
Free file managers are around since ages, there is quite a few around. The double commander's customizations are amazing. You can quickly change the default fonts as well. Definitely a product to bookmark – here is the download link which leads to SourceForge.
