July 15, 2008

PCMan File Manager 0.4.5 Review

Two days ago I reviewed Xfe, a pretty good file manager built using the FOX toolkit, so today I'll continue in the same fashion reviewing PCMan FM, a GTK file manager with a simplistic interface and basic features.

PCManFM - list view

PCManFM has a left tab providing directory tree view and location view, including bookmarks, and the file view section which occupies the most of the remaining space. You can select in the View menu which one (directory tree view or location view) you want to be displayed by default. It also allows sorting files and directories by several rules, like name, size, modification date, type, permissions and owner. Files and folders can also be displayed as icons, compact list (which is similar with Konqueror's multi-column view), or detailed list (which shows detailed information about each file).

PCManFM also includes tabs, which at the current date is a plus over Nautilus, the default file manager in GNOME. Nautilus is expected to get full tabs support in the next GNOME release, 2.24. It also has a menu entry for compressing and extracting compressed archives, supporting gzip, bzip2 and zip.

Preferences

It includes only basic configuration options, like sizes for icons or thumbnails, no split views, profiles support or integrated terminal.

About

In essence, PCManFM is a great file manager for those who like a clean and simple interface, which provides tabs and enough features to be fully-functional and pretty useful. Some even prefer it over Nautilus due to its ability for tabs.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Also, one would want to consider using PCManFM with the excellent LXDE desktop environment, of which PCManFM is a component. It is a very fast, smooth GTK2-based environment.
Personally, I prefer Xfce with Thunar, but PCManFM is impressively fast.