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Comment by arunc | Hacker News Reader

I've settled on DoubleCmd [1] for over 3 years now. Open source and cross platform and even snapshot builds [2] are pretty stable. Double click to navigate to parent folder, etc. Highly recommend for power users.

[1] https://doublecmd.sourceforge.io/

[2] https://doublecmd.sourceforge.io/site/eng/snapshots.html

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+1. In my opinion Double Commander has the best multi-file renaming capabilities too. (Don't let the beta status put you off. The releases, as mentioned above, are very stable.)

i wish their site has at least one screenshot of what the app looks like. It's hard for anyone to evaluate whether they should switch over without even looking at an image first!

There is a link to the screenshot section at the top right.

Did you see https://doublecmd.sourceforge.io/gallery/?

hah, no i didn't even notice! And the funny thing is, the link is hidden behind a horizontal scroll because i have a small browser window!

As a tangent, I found it fascinating that Double Commander is developed with Free Pascal and Lazarus.

https://github.com/doublecmd/doublecmd/wiki/Development

https://freepascal.org/

https://www.lazarus-ide.org/

Double commander is IMO better then TC (apart from still being buggy). It has better interface for included tools like multi rename and is cross-platform. Since all TC plugins work in it, there is no need to use TC.

I created bunch of chocolatey packages that can be used with both and 2 skins that make them look the same:

- DC: https://chocolatey.org/packages/dcc-unlit

- TC: https://chocolatey.org/packages/tcc-unlit

- DC/TC with bunch of plugins depending on what you have installed (both at the same time work too): https://chocolatey.org/packages/tcp

So, one of those two commands will make you have almost exactly the same experience with 20 or so really useful plugins all installed within minute unattended and with all components updated with single command (the TC one being commercial):

    cinst doublecmd tcp       
    cinst totalcommander tcp

    cup all # update TC/DC or any plugin/config any time

There is a micro framework included so anybody can make their own configurations in minutes or publish any type of plugin:

- https://github.com/majkinetor/au-packages/tree/master/tcp

Looks like a clone of Total Commander?

Yes, it is even mentioned on the web site and it also supports Total Commander plugins (IIRC Ghisler mentioned at some point that he's fine with other file managers adding support for TC plugins since it means there will be more plugins available).

Sadly it feature-wise it is very behind Total Commander, i use TC all day all the time and DC always feels like an unfinished alpha version of TC. It kinda reminds me of Midnight Commander vs FAR Manager with the latter being way more advanced than MC (though Windows only), but even then despite its lack of features MC still feels mature and is what i end up using on Linux despite preferring GUI applications.

Perhaps if i ever decide to switch to Linux as my main OS at some point i'll try to work on Double Commander myself and implement the stuff i'm missing. From what i can see it is written in Free Pascal and Lazarus which are my jam anyway :-P (FWIW the 64bit version of Total Commander is also now compiled using Lazarus so i hope at some point Ghisler releases a Linux version...).

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