Far file manager is free and open source now
The very powerful, console and text based, Linux Midnight Commander (MC) and Norton Commander (NC) like, orthodox file manager, Windows oriented, Far file manager, now is free and open source, with Unicode support. Previously it was shareware with $25 register fee.
Far file manager can improve the user's, especially programmer's, productivity significantly in the ways of:
- Keyboard based. You can use keyboard to do everything. Copy files? F5. Bookmark and go to bookmark? Ctrl+Shift+Number and Ctrl+Number. Keyboard is always the best friend to programmers, rather than mouse.
- Integrated file manager and file editor. Press key F4 to edit selected file immediately. It's quite efficiently to edit source files which lacks a decent productive IDE, such as Perl script, HTML, CSS, etc.
- Double side by side file panels makes file management easier than ever.
- A lot of plugins are available and they extend the file manager ability significantly.
I personally had been using the 1.70 version for quite long time, now I've started experimenting the new 2.0 version which includes unicode support. If you are also trying it, note that there is problem with Unicode characters, you may try ConEmu to have better Unicode support. I tried, ConEmu works fine.
My favorite Far file manager plugins:
- Colorer4Ever: a must have plugin that adds colored text highlight feature to viewer and editor. It supports a lot of programming languages, such as C++, Java, Perl, HTML, and a lot more.
- Incsr121: increment search. Very useful if you are already familiar with same function in other editors or IDEs.
- TextNavigate: adds Delphi IDE style text navigating. Press key Ctrl+Alt+Up or Ctrl+Alt+Down to search previous or next word same as the one under the cursor.
- EMenu: adds Windows Explorer context menu. Very useful to connect Far with Explorer.
- ProcList: displays active processes in Far file panel. Useful to terminate dead process when task manager doesn't response (GUI is hang).
- EditComplete: adds auto complete feature. Far 2 has build-in auto complete support.
- HexEditor: adds hex editor to the internal editor.
- PEeditor: view and edit Windows Portable Executable file header in FAR. Useful if you are learning PE format.