Commander One – Dual Pane File Manager for Mac | Hacker News Reader

Commander One – Dual Pane File Manager for Mac

mac.eltima.com

31 pointsDasha_Eltima31 comments

Hat's off to you, guys!

I search for 'FAR alternative for mac' every 3-4 months (to no avail so far), so very happy to have discovered this.

One question - would it be possible to implement live display of folder size? To me size of a folder is much more important than individual files. I already have it working in Finder - so believe the system tools for it are there.

It has "Calculate Folder size on Space" feature.

Do you mean I can configure it to show folder size in the column 'Size' (as opposed to clicking on a specific folder to get that information)?

I have to say, as a somewhat long time mac user (switched in 2009), I don't get it. I downloaded it, tried it briefly, and couldn't figure out what advantage it had.

On HackerNews I occasionally see people complaining about the Finder, and mostly I'm left mystified. Maybe if I had used Mac Classic, I'd understand.

I find the dual-pane interface most convenient if I'm actually managing files (mostly cp, mv, mkdir). Midnight commander was a command-line version of this and IMO one of its killer features was making it easy to copy files over FTP or SFTP just as if it was a local folder.

Windows solves this problem by letting me snap Windows Explorer windows (well, all windows, really) to the left and right halves of the screen easily.

In Finder, you just deal with windows being messy and overlapping all the time and that's okay.

I use Spectacle (http://spectacleapp.com/) for snapping left/right, sort of like a lazy man's tiling window manager, and it's pretty great. The only thing it doesn't work with for me is Adobe products; not much of a surprise there, admittedly.

I use better touch tool. The windows snapping of 7 (which I use for work) is the best feature. I've heard it's even better in 8 and 10.

Better Touch Tool is free and easy to install so I don't consider it a hindrance really.

Looks like a nice lightweight and free alternative to the more extensive finder replacement app, Pathfinder by Cocoatech

http://cocoatech.com/pathfinder/

It's more a replacement for Forklift (another great commander app) or other commander apps. Pathfinder is actually a finder replacement and fixes a ton of the little terrible things in finder.

I wanted to like Path Finder, but within 10 minutes of using the trial version to move some files it crashed and I lost data.

I gave up on it, but never did find anything that looked as capable on paper.

Yeah, Pathfinder's file transferring is far from reliable for large sets of files (although the normal finder tends to be just as bad with large file transfers). For queuing a bunch of small file transfers it's usually okay.

Looks interesting, I currently use XtraFinder [1] for this though, it integrates directly with finder instead of a separate application—although this does bring a couple additional features...

[1] http://www.trankynam.com/xtrafinder/

The best two-pane file manager on any platform remains Directory Opus.

http://www.gpsoft.com.au/

It got its start on the Amiga and is now Windows-only.

Full disclosure: I wrote a review of it on another site two years ago.

I use XtraFinder: http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/42067/xtrafinder

Seems like if you are cool with the price point Pathfinder does this better.

Started using this on my work and personal Macbooks, very nice. One oddity is that command+C copies but command+option+V doesn't do a Move (as it does in Finder). Otherwise great so far.

Doesn't seem to understand command-delete to delete a file. Just beeps at me, as does plain delete.

File menu says F8 is delete file ... which is not intuitive (or convenient) to me.

I have some directories that I need to clean up, by moving some files into more directories (sigh) or deleting files.

There doesn't appear to be a way to turn off "do you mean to delete this file?" in the preferences. And "delete" doesn't mean what I thought it meant - I want to do what it calls "permanently delete".

Guess it's back to two finder windows.

Shift-fn-delete seems to do a perma-delete, but still displays the "r u sure?" prompt.

How about fn-delete? Or maybe I'll download and try it myself...

EDIT: Yep, that works.

F8 is actually the default hotkey for deletion in all OFMs. Delete would usually be reserved for editing the command line.

Can someone explain why it wants to use accessibility features to control my Mac? I don't understand the downside but I also don't know what permissions I'm giving it.

I don't have experience with this app but a lot of the mac apps I use request accessibility features. The most common use case is needing to access the keyboard for global shortcuts. Take a look at the mac app Amethyst as an example. I hope it helps to know that some mac apps do have good reasons for requesting access to accessibility features.

How does this compare to something like Path Finder?

I've been using this for quite a few years and I can't recommend it enough.

>I've been using this for quite a few years and I can't recommend it enough.

Using what?

Path Finder. It seems that somehow I've managed to screw up the reply. Sorry :)

This is a file manager. Path Finder is a finder replacement. They aren't really comparable. But it's better than using normal finder for file management.

Sorry, haven't been a mac user for a couple years (has it been that long!) so maybe things have changed, but what is Finder other than a file manager?

Need tab lock/protect, tab title rename

It looks interesting

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