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Comment by willis936 | Hacker News Reader

In case anyone out there hasn’t moved on: WinSCP is better than FileZilla ever was.

When FileZilla started doing the adware thing years ago, I switched to WinSCP on Windows and never looked back. I was so pissed at FileZilla that I stopped using it on Linux even though their Linux builds didn't have any adware. gFTP is good enough for most servers, and recent versions fixed a lot of long standing bugs. On Mac it's Cyberduck all the way.

For mac I had a paid FTP client called YummyFTP, the app was superb, however the developer passed away and the app stayed on 32 bits

I'm spoiled with Transmit :)

Transmit is good too, although I really liked the Scheduling function YummyFTP had. It was great for setting a large download to 2AM when the DSL network wasn't overloaded. Wish Transmit would add that feature. I suppose it can be done with Automator but it's not as nice as built in.

In the golden age of FTP there are plenty of great proprietary clients. Of of my mind I can think of (for Windows) FlashFXP, FTPRush, CuteFTP, SmartFTP, and so on.

There's also Cyberduck for Windows.

When I looked to FileZilla alternatives some time ago, I was surprised that there wasn't actually many alternatives. WinSCP is my default now too.

It's been a long time ... perhaps 12 or 15 years ... but when I was driving a FreeBSD desktop I would install Konqueror as a file manager and then plug in:

fish://

... addresses and browse SFTP-capable addresses very conveniently.

I have no idea if any of these components (Konqueror ? fish ?) are still in use ?

I thought it was a tremendously convenient workflow and it was nice to not have a different application for file management and SSH file endpoints.

Which leads me to my lament that all these years later you can't just put an sftp:// address into the mac finder. It's an almost comically blatant missing feature.

It still works just as you'd expect in Dolphin (the current KDE file manager), you click in the breadcrumb address bar on top, type in fish:// and the address, and you get a login prompt.

All of the other KIO slaves work as well, certainly SMB/CIFS works great and I use it all the time.

KDE has all these nice convenient little features that just makes everyday tasks a bit easier.

How much KDE Do I need to install just to get dolphin?

That is, if I am using a different window manager such as ion3...

Depends on how it's packaged you could trivially end up with an extra GB of libraries. I guess it depends on whether that much storage is meaningful.

I use dolphin with i3 on arch. It's not nothing (particularly if you install optional deps for features like thumbnailing or search indexing), you have a lot of the foundational modules like kparts and kio required, but it's not like you'll end up installing kdm, kwin, or the desktop apps: https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/dolphin/

WinSCP also has epic automation interface which include PowerShell cmdlets, unlike mentioned competitors.

CyberDuck is a nicer-looking and more user-friendly alternative to both.

So buggy though.

I do like CyberDucks features when it comes to cloud storage like S3, but I do miss the WinScp file commander like interface.

Did not realize that CyberDuck has a Windows version; thanks!

CyberDuck ten years ago was the only Mac FTP app that actually worked.

Alternative too, esp for console fans: Midnight Commander

any chance you know of something comparable for linux? I have tried a half dozen or so in last few months and keep coming back to filezilla, maybe it's because it's familiar, but always like options.

I use lftp. The website design tells you exactly how the tool works.

https://lftp.yar.ru/

One of the most valuable features is its ability to download a single file over multiple connections

    pget -n 4 your.file.tar.gz

because many ISPs limit speed per flow and opening multiple of them, even to the same target, allows you to max out your connection.

appreciated, thank you

I use this all the time not due to ISP limits but in Australia the 200-400ms latency limits you instead especially as you go over 50Mbit. Mirror command is also great :)

+1 for lftp. On windows I use it via Cygwin for scheduled tasks etc. FileZilla has a speed advantage over winscp but nothing like the flexibility.

Your file manager probably does FTP. Try enter a [s]FTP[s]:// URL into your location field. Depending on your distro, for gnome or derivatives you might have to install a gvfs plugin package first.

Just to add, you file manager probably does SCP and SFTP too. So, on Linux just launch whatever tool you use to browse and copy files, it will probably work seamlessly.

It's Windows that does nothing out of the box, so people has to go after tools.

Windows does this out of the box, by typing in an ftp:// address into the default explorer file manager address bar. it even saves logins if you want. Windows has done this since Windows 95 /IE4 days. Good to know that Linux has finally joined the fresh tech wave of the 90's and copied that basic useful function.

My little brother once heard Jack and Diane on the radio, and proudly proclaimed that John Cougar Mellencamp has copied Jessica Simpson's "I Think I'm in Love with You." That also was funny.

> Good to know that Linux has finally joined the fresh tech wave of the 90's and copied that basic useful function.

I don't think anyone has said that Linux didn't do this in the 90s too, e.g. KDE supports this since KDE2, released in the year 2000: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_Desktop_Environment_2

In pretty much its current transparent form, though more protocols have been added since.

Not sure what CDE supported, which I think was the big pre-Gnome/KDE UI.

WinSCP is so much better than Filezilla, I just run it in Wine.

There is also Gftp, which is most probably available in your distro.

https://github.com/masneyb/gftp

Last time I compared the two Filezilla was a lot faster on fast connections. Grabbing the same bunch of files from the same server it was as at times literally twice as fast as WinSCP.

If you're talking nearly 10 years ago, yes I saw that too, but WinSCP has long since improved dramatically.

I'm probably talking 3-4 years ago.

The nice thing about FileZilla is that you don't have to qualify which OS you're using. Now it's "Grab WinSCP if you're using Windows, X if Linux, Y if macOS. Now here are 3 separate pages we probably didn't keep up to date on how to connect and download what you need from our servers."

Nah, they had a long runing bug where the client was -significantly- slower at transferring files than filezilla (or plain old CLI). They fixed it a couple years ago though and I'd say now it's easily an equal without all the baggage.

Neither Cyberduck nor WinSCP seem to be able to do parallel transfers as well as FileZilla can, especially over SFTP - i.e. FileZilla is about twice as fast downloading from a server ~300ms away than WinSCP is, and this is on a gigabit connection.

Could as well just use Double Commander, or platform-specific analogs, and have a good file manager for both local files and ftp/ssh. (Though admittedly fewer features might be supported over the net.)

This often works the other way around, too; remote file managers like WinSCP can usually do local things just fine.

WinSCP was using too much CPU when I last checked (years ago TBH), and it doesn't work on Linux.

For macOS, I'm spoiled with Forklift, which does a lot of things out of the box, sufficiently.

For Linux the default file managers all support SFTP/SCP.

Also there's Krusader (KDE/Qt - https://krusader.org/ ) if you want something with two panes.

For most of the time, I use KDE's own KIO slaves but, sometimes for long running stuff I want something more advanced. TBH, my remote servers list is taking a lot of space on the left pane. :D

Will take a look to Krusader, didn't check it for a very long time.

Edit: Just checked, it looks a lot like PathFinder (for macOS). Will try it, thanks again.

Agreed, but FZ has built in support for backblaze b2. Anyone have an alternative? Other than cyberduck, the performance was too low to be useful to me.

B2 has an S3-compatible API, so WinSCP should work.

Good point! Last I was looking at this was before the B2 S3 api was available. Might consider switching to WinSCP now.

wish Commander view add `ADDRESS` bar for quick dir changes.

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