Marta File Manager: Back on Track | Hacker News Reader

Marta File Manager: Back on Track

marta.sh

34 pointsiscmt22 comments

Re. native part -- I recently explored JavaFX for desktop, and found it's actually very fast, both to run and to develop in. I'd say it's a joy to use, don't understand why market now prefers other heavy-weight solutions like Electron. Maybe it was released at a wrong time, when Sun Microsystems had troubles? Maybe it was too early? Or maybe a ton of software is being written in it without fanfares, I dunno.

The whole binding stuff is neat, feels like a predecessor to Reactive Streams (which is itself is already standardized in Java under java.util.concurrent).

Wouldn’t you need to have a JVM installed to deploy a JavaFX app? Is there something for bundling self-contained Java apps easily?

The JDK now supports building standalone executables.

https://docs.oracle.com/javase/9/tools/javapackager.htm#JSWO...

Would this generate ~150mb images like the similarly-named jpackage or is it possible to trim down the runtime?

Yes, but Electron apps are about the same size: (Slack: 120MB, 1password: 136MB, Discord: 103MB).

But it was a problem in dial-up times, so maybe JavaFX appeared too early, when 150MB was not ok.

And Python runtime is about 20MB, but it's kinda assumed it's already installed (who knows which version though, for Python it's important, not so much with Java). Maybe Sun also expected their target audience to eventually have a JRE already installed on end-user machines.

Problem is that the entire runtime is packaged. Nice for large enterprise solutions, but not for small apps. And if I remember correctly the memory footprint isn't nice either.

You can trim down the runtime[1] but the tooling around doing this is non-existent / unreliable. Alternatively, you can generate native binaries with GraalVM[2] which comes with its own baggage (license, slow compile time, etc).

[1]: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/embedded/develop-apps-platf...

[2]: https://www.graalvm.org/

But most popular modern desktop apps also bring the whole runtime packaged, just not Java (Node.js / Chromium) (Slack: 120MB, 1password: 136MB, Discord: 103MB).

So I don't see much a difference actually. 30MB is not a lot anymore, not for network, not for disk.

Let's see how it goes, still searching for a good FM on mac. Regarding full-featured file managers on OSX - there's Double Commander. Works well, preview on F3 is fast (and can use system preview for various media files). A bit unstable though, and behaves weird on network operations.

Pathfinder is great for my needs.

Wonder if you ever tried these:

- QSpace (https://qspace.awehunt.com/en-us/index.html)

- Commander One (https://commander-one.com)

Commander One is kinda barebones, QSpace looks like Finder plus some bonus stuff. Compared to godly Total Commander (on windows), everything else is very shallow. Double Commander tried to replicate it, and kinda succeeded, to an extent. It's not about big shiny features, it's about all the small nitpicks you do regularly.

Example: move file panel cursor on a file (as example, big text file), press F3 to open it. Built-in preview opens first page very fast even if file is 1GB+, by not loading anything except the first page ;) scrolling also works without visual lag even on slow HDD. Now press ESC and focus is back on a window you came from and can continue navigation.

Something as simple as focus thing is regularly broken on oh so many file managers

Does Total Commander work under Wine?

Can anyone confirm if this is Open Source or not? Looks like it used github as an issue tracker but I'm not seeing the source code anywhere.

It is not Open Source. But it is the best file manager on macOS.

whats the catch? not open source but free?

A year or two ago when I first read about it, I saw in the software faq, or maybe it was a post by its creator on HN itself or reddit, that they will make it paid once it reaches stable version(version 1?).

If you pay $15 in total via Patreon, you'll get perpetual license.

Yeah it does look really nice.

what do people think about installing new software from less well known companies and giving the app full access to all your files? how would i convince myself that this software won't upload my data in the background?

I personally have a hard time trusting closed source software random sources I've never heard of before. Maybe I'm just too paranoid but I try not to run random software especially something that has as widespread access to my data as a file-manager.

The author here. Marta doesn't perform any network activity besides update checks, which you can disable. If you wish, you can block all network access for the application in your firewall.

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