Hacker News Reader

Comment by hobofan | Hacker News Reader

It was kind of inevitable that after VC-funded terminals, mail clients, launchers sooner or later there would be file explorer.

As someone on Linux (popOS), I also gladly welcome it, as even the best file explorer I know (nemo) could use niceties that you find on Windows or macOS.

I'm highly skeptical of the economics of it though. The only way I would see it working out, if their planned "sync" product would be able to overcome the entrenchment of iCloud/OneDrive/Dropbox, which seems like a tall order. As a user I'd pay ~$50/year, but that would take a lot of customers to sustain even the current team size.

View on HN

"It was kind of inevitable that after VC-funded terminals, mail clients, launchers sooner or later there would be file explorer."

Well, Nautilus [1] (nw "Gnome Files" apparently) was created for Gnome quite a long time ago now. The company was Eazel and included some ex-Apple luminaries. So money spent on file managing is nothing new.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME_Files

OK, that explains why I have so many problems with the Nautilus UI! I switched to Thunar but it's missing some nice-to-haves. I'll have to check Nemo.

Regarding Spacedrive... Seems a solid idea but I think their UI goals (looks fancy) might not be aligned with my preferences (minimal, fast, high functionality, no jank).

> OK, that explains why I have so many problems with the Nautilus UI!

Eazel was 22 years ago, I highly doubt your problems with Nautilus have anything to do with them.

If you only want sync then Syncthing [1] is better than all of those and doesn't put you data in the cloud.

[1] https://syncthing.net/

The cloud storage is the part I'm not interested in. I already use Syncthing, and it fills that need really well (tough with a UX so meh that I'd be hesitant to hand it to non-developers). I'm interested in e.g. tagging of files and a good GUI, and Syncthing doesn't really do any of that (unless I've missed something).

What I would love to see is a UI on top of Syncthing that would allow for remote management so that it would be easier to add and remove folders without having to visit the remote devices physically.

I suppose I really should just get on and do something myself. :-(

Remote management sounds like a security nightmare.

Not if one can communicate through Syncthing itself.

I think for there are two already okay options. As Syncthings UI is already in the browser, one would be to just host that page in a way that it's remotely accessible (e.g. in you VPN, where I can highly recommend Tailscale). The other would be to use the option that Syncthing has built in to auto-accept folder invites from certain devices (that's what I have set up on my always-on server so I don't have to SSH into it every time).

What niceties? I cannot remember when i last used a MacOS file manager, but the default one in Windows felt worse than the Linux ones.

Have you tried Dolphin on Linux?

These days I mostly use broot.

I do miss the preview sidebar (bigger than thumbnail, renders and paginates PDFs even) and spacebar to pop a lightweight Preview.app modal window from when I used macOS.

Dolphin has the former bar PDF pagonation.

What do you mean? Commercial file mangers exist for decades now. They are a bit out of style with everything being open source, but the old guard is still around on Windows & MacOS, and new fledglings appear on mobile regularly.

They said VC funded. Not commercial.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com