Hacker News Reader

Comment by jasperry | Hacker News Reader

Honest question about two-pane file managers: I understand that dual-pane is useful when you need to see the contents of two folders for copying and syncing multiple files. But for me, that seems like a minority part of my usage. More commonly, I have multiple tabs for different projects, and within those tabs, navigation is mostly up and down the folder hierarchy within each project. Opening the source and destination folders in the panes every time I want to copy seems like more work than just copy, navigate, and paste.

Can anyone enlighten me about this? Is it just my poor organizational skills?

View on HN

When I don't need to copy files even when navigating in a single panel (and just ignoring content of the second one) still have advantages.

- I get a free ls when I navigate directory structure, and with the keyboard shortcuts I can move much faster.

- If the panel is ordered by time the moment I open the folder I see most recent files (in some cases I only care about recent files when opening a folder). If ordered by size you see your biggest files first, etc. And all of this is stateful, you don't need to run a command to identify biggest/latest file, do something with it and then go back to check what as the second biggest/latest file.

- it is easier to check content of the file or an archive

- two panels also work seamlessly with ssh/ftp/archives/etc. You don't need to remember separate commands to copy files from other sources, you will use exactly same pattern for navigating and copying files.

I also understand that people who mastered shell don't see this as a big advantage. But it really helps when jumping between mac/nix/windows.

Well, you don't have to use the two pane mode if you don't want anyway. You can switch to single pane mode, use the second pane for file info, use the second pane as a directory tree in the manner of a "regular" single pane explorer, etc.

To perform your "copy, navigate, paste" task while in mc's single pane mode you could either:

a) tag files, pop open the second pane temporarily, navigate and copy.

b) tag files, swap the panes in the background, navigate and copy.

c) tag files, use the bindings to copy them to the inbuilt command line, navigate and copy. Using the "quick cd" dialog would probably speed this up.

d) any of the above with inverted target and source movement.

e) probably a thousand other more sensible ways than the three or cheat-y six I just thought of ;)

If you are moving many or large files, the two-pane mode allows you to see the state of the move in real time. You can also see name conflicts more easily rather than wait for a popup. Sure, you could open up two tabs or two windows, but that is more cumbersome than a single window for the task.

I agree with that. I guess my question is: do you always use two panes to copy? And does your file manager have something like tabs for different contexts where you would not necessarily be moving files between them?

Moving a few files, no. But a professional move, say something that is going to take more than 30 minutes due to speed/size issues, yes i would use a two-pane tool. Another case would be if the destination had a dynamic ammount of free space, such as to a running server. I would use two panes so i could abort before filling the destination.

When you hit F5 (copy) or F6 (move) you typically get a dialog with the destination of the action where the other pane is pre-entered as a default so can just hit Return to start, but which you can also override by typing something before hitting Return. You can type whatever relative or absolute destination you want without having to navigate there explicitly in the other pane. For up/down one directory I personally type .. or the child-directory, if the destination is further away it is often more convenient to navigate there in the other pane.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com