Twin-pane file managers

[Nicholas Bodley]

As life goes, I'm progressively migrating from 98 SE (no longer a prime  
target!) to Linux, and one of the most comfortable parts of the Old Shoe  
is the imho superb shareware file manager, Total Commander by Christian  
Ghisler. (I gladly paid his modest sum.) As much as any part of my old  
environment, that's one app. I really hate to leave behind. (Yes, I'm  
aware of Wine, C.O., and Win4Lin, etc.)

So far, I've tried:

@ mc (still use it, but it's sometimes distressingly idiosyncratic; simply  
changing a filename without doing a [move] is a mini-education in Unix,  
almost...) Also ugly, sorry to say, in default form. (I do care about  
appearance.) Nevertheless, as it now stands, it's quite a nice piece of  
work.

@ Nautilus (*What* are they thinking?) ... Abandoned, quickly.
@ TkDesk (no, it's not a twin-pane source/destination setup; has other  
virtues (and a phenomenally-persistent toolbar!))
@ Gnome Commander -- more like it, but development ceased a while back,  
and it didn't do enough of what I wanted.

So far.

[emelFM]
I have a lot more hope for something called emelFM, which iirc I found via  
the app. list in Synaptic, perhaps by using its Search function. Odd name,  
but would Unix have even survived if it had Colorless Corporate Names  
(CCN) for everything? (I'm still trying to accept "noatun" and "defoma" as  
routine. "Noatun" looks so odd, to me, that it haunts me, just a tad.)  
"Vista": I'm underwhelmed.

emelFM is written by Michael Clark, apparently at the U. of Pittsburgh,  
who seems to be quite self-effacing; no Help-->About info. in it. It's a  
nicely-developed twin-pane Norton Commander descendant, with a bunch of  
quite-useful "button" widgets that do good and useful things, such as  
simple H buttons that toggle display of hidden files. It has an [mc]-style  
command line, with something like Ctrl-o toggling of a "built-in  
terminal". (Try Ctrl-z, instead; the "keys" list is a bit outdated.)

{some details}
The default layout is twin-pane, side by side, with maybe the lower  
quarter being a full-width "terminal output" space. (If you take the hint,  
and ask for the key bindings, surely enough, lots of Good Stuff scrolls  
past. No piping to [less], either; doesn't work. Reminds me of Moss Doss.  
However: Grab the divider, and raise the output area until you can see all  
the key commands (I hope! Spoiled utterly rotten, running at 1280 x 1024).  
Try a Ctrl-z. Look down in the lower-left corner, where you'll see a [^]  
in a little outline. That also toggles the "terminal".

It's extensible and configurable, and works the way I want a file manager  
to work. I'm about to send a message of thanks to Michael.

A few, still to investigate are:

Worker, by Ralf Hoffmann, of Germany:
<http://www.boomerangsworld.de/worker/> It looks good, and is being  
maintained/developed.
Googling on [worker ralf hoffmann] gave some hopeful-looking hits.

Gentoo (yes, the name of a file manager):
Author is Emil Brink; it's not as easy to find, and iirc, the developer's  
own page for it was lost. Sourceforge seems to have been a priceless  
archive in that event.
<http://freshmeat.net/projects/gentoo>
There's a [.rpm]; for Debian,
<http://packages.debian.org/unstable/X11/gentoo.html> is a page to get you  
close.

FileRunner looked good (especially for FTP), but its author seems to have  
abandoned it in 1999.

Best regards,

-- 
Nicholas Bodley /\ @ /\  Waltham, Mass.
Sent by Opera e-mail in Libranet GNU/Linux 3.0
Midnight hacker in 1960