Orthodox File Managers

You know, I'm starting to suspect that I favour the command line a little too much, sometimes at the detriment of my own sanity. While the command line is awesome for doing things like running complex programs, or even to use a barebones-esque no-nonsense text editor, there are some limitations that even I have to start to admit that are causing severe productivity issues.

File management is one problem that I think the command line is really nasty for. Put simply, it becomes quite nasty to have to retype very long paths that come from very strict hierarchical management of the underlying file system. Couple this with the need to transfer files remotely, some form of location persistence would have been very useful.

Recently, in a bid to deal with that problem, I've started to dabble in the notion of the orthodox file manager. Orthodox file managers are a very mature technology---even in the days of DOS, there was the DOSSHELL that made navigating the file system easy. It wasn't that necessary then though due to the 8.3 file limitation. Part of the reason of my annoyance with modern systems comes from the need to escape various characters in the file names. Aaanyway, as I was saying, orthodox file managers. The old standby that I'm using for Linux and Unix-y systems is Midnight Commander. It's simple and gets the job done---it supports file type highlighting too, check it out at this site for some ideas.

For Windows, MC is a little strange to work with. For that, I actually go with FAR manager, a product originally from the creator of WinRAR. FAR manager works like MC, except that it is in Windows of course. But unlike MC, FAR manager can be extended with various plug-ins, and the one that is most useful is the FarNetBox, which allows one to connect to servers via SSL to perform transparent file copies. (Note: I'm using FAR 2.x, so I will need that plug-in. This site shows more plug-ins for FAR 3.x, which is still undergoing development.)

Well, that's all I wanted to talk about regarding orthodox file managers. Till the next time.