Double Commander (file manager)

[hikohan]

All Platforms support

• https://github.com/doublecmd/doublecmd/releases

Written in Pascal. Double Commander is a free cross platform open source file manager with two panels side by side. It is inspired by Total Commander and features new ideas.

Features

1. Internal text editor (F4) with syntax hightlighting
2. Built in file viewer (F3) to view files of in hex, binary or text format
3. Archives are handled like subdirectories. You can easily copy files to and from archives. Supported archive types: ZIP, TAR, GZ, BZ2, XZ, LZMA, 7Z and also RPM, CPIO, DEB, RAR, ZIPX
4. Extended search function with full text search in any files
5. Configurable button bar to start external programs or internal menu commands
6. Total Commander WCX, WDX, WFX and WLX plug-ins support
7. Locale Language support.

[geo_c]

This looks really nice!

I haven't tested and run anything, but downloaded portable gtk2, qt6, and appimages and booted up portable gtk2 on KLV-airedale!

It looks like a nice cross between Xfe and midnight commander, and running gtk2 uses the system theme. The top bar has all my loaded KL layers in it. I'm not sure how those come up by default, but it's pretty cool. I'll have get to know this manager, as I never used it before.

[geo_c]

Been using this for a day or so now, and it's very nice.

It's a great combination of many of the features of some of my favorite file managers. Like a cross between Midnight Commander, Xfe, Ranger, pcmanfm.

It's tabbed, does file previews, uses function key operation, highly customizeable both in look and operations, has a really nice built-in editor, and I'm starting to get around it pretty well. It's windows keybinding oriented, which is not a problem, very logical.

I've been using the portable gtk2 version, and I think I'll unzip the portable QT version and try it. The gtk2 doesn't play well with my current gtk theme in that the checkbox colors hide the checkbox contents, changing gtk themes solves that issue. Of course I can probably just change the internal color settings, as everything is configurable in this file manager, the file list columns, fonts for every dialog and window, etc. I'll try the QT version and see about customizing the theme.

I still need to upgrade my Xfe version to 2.0, but I'm swimming in strong customized file managers now, mc, ranger, clifm, pcmanfm, thunar, rox, xfe, and double commander.

[geo_c]

Using Double Commander more and more these days. It really is a fine blend of file manager capabilities. Customizing the theme can be a bit wonky as all the colors are definable and are changed in the options menu much like elinks, which I spent about 2 days making a custom theme for.

But once some of the keystrokes and menus become familiar, this is a powerful and fun file manager with a nice preview pane, editor, function key operations, keystroke operations, on and on. Today I'm managing my calendars and log files that I normally use ranger to edit, and this is equally as adept at managing them. Ranger is pretty swift though, renarming a file by typing "a," copy and paste "yy-pp." Still, this works very nicely.

Here's my theme currently, a combination of my chosen gtk and custom pane and column colors:

[geo_c]

Well I just can't express how much I like this Double Commander gtk2 file manager.

As I've been saying, it combines the best elements of mc, ranger, xfe all in one nice portable package. It's not even installed on this system. It's simply running from my portable app directory.

I also booted up the portable QT versions, and on some OS's and monitors those may be the best choice. There's a QT5 and a QT6 variation.

Double Commander comes with image, txt, json and host of other file preview capabilities, with color highlighting. Shown below I'm viewing the contents of the colors.json, the color config file for double commander. I copied that file to store the current purple theme I've been tweaking, so when I decide to create another theme I'll have a theme collection started.,

It has an internal viewer launched on the F3 key, internal editor on the F4 key, and a preview pane launched with ctrl-Q. Internal view and edit can be changed to an external application of choice. I have mine set to xfw to view (F3) and geany (F4) to edit.

It's tabbed with a directory hotlist so you can keep tabs open all over the system and bounce around cutting and pasting. ctrl-D opens the directory hotlist.

The command line terminal view at the bottom can accept commands in the terminal viewer itself, or from the command prompt field below it, So interactive cli scripts can be run and interacted with from either the terminal window or the command prompt field, all while still having access to the file panes and menus. The windows are resizeable of course.

The only thing it doesn't have over Ranger fm would be pdf preview, which is not much a deal breaker because the pdf preview in Ranger is only the front page of the pdf anyway, and viewing the rest of pdf file requires launching an external application. Ranger does give me thumbnails of videos with the scope.sh configured to use ffmpeg, and I haven't tested that ability in Double Commander yet.

But Double Commander does play audio files using mplayer (if it's installed, which on my systems always is, don't know what it does if it's not present) without the mplayer gui interface being launched (which may not be desirable since you might want to stop the playback and the process has to be killed) and of course you can right click on a file and use Open with.. just like Rox or Xfe and use a graphical app of choice.

[geo_c]

I did find one capability not built into double commander that caused me to launch Xfe, which I had not used for a good 48 hours. I've been working intensely at my day job only using double commander all of yesterday. These tasks involve a lot of text file editing, viewing, and running command line scripts, and double commander with geany tiled on top works very smoothly for that.

That one missing capability in double commander is selecting multiple files and relative symlinking them from one directory to another. This is incredibly simple in Xfe: select files, right-click, symlink-to.

In double commander the symlink command is in the file menu, but it doesn't allow for symlinking multiple selected files.

I suppose in double commander I could do it from the command line. Truth is I'm not sure how to symlink multiple files just using a bash command. I'll have to look that one up.

[libertas]

I suppose in double commander I could do it from the command line. Truth is I'm not sure how to symlink multiple files just using a bash command. I'll have to look that one up.

Hi @geo_c,

you can do it like this.
In some dir,

Code: Select all

# touch a1 a2 a3
# for f in a*; do ln -s $f symlinkdir/$f; done
# ls -l symlinkdir/
total 0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 2 Apr  8 21:14 a1 -> a1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 2 Apr  8 21:14 a2 -> a2
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 2 Apr  8 21:14 a3 -> a3

[Burunduk]

Code: Select all

touch file{1..5}.txt
mkdir links
ln -sr *.txt links

It should be possible to add this as a custom button.

Something like: command ln; parameters -sr %f %Dt.

But I don't have DC installed to test it.

[jamesbond]

Double Commander 1.1.23 (qt version) is now available in the repo.
It's a re-packaged official binary.