For all of the strengths of OS X, two of the complaints recycled year after year are the aged filesystem, HFS+, with its lack of file integrity, and the file manager, the Finder. While replacing HFS+ remains out of our reach, an alternative to the Finder for day-to-day tasks has been achievable for some time. Enter “Commander One,” a dual-pane file manager that seeks to fill in the holes that the Finder has famously left. Let’s dig in and see what Commander One has to offer.
Power users across the world celebrate and vilify the Finder, both for being a flexible file manger and for being needlessly cut off at the knees. Those comfortable at the terminal know that OS X, with its UNIX underpinnings, is much more powerful than its GUI cousin the Finder would have you believe. Commander One is an attempt to address those missing features. And it does an admirable job at that. Along with those options, of course, comes increased UI complexity. Here’s why I think that’s okay: Commander One is already targeting a subset of OS X users: if you’re looking for a file manager alternative, you’re probably not someone who is going to obsess about the numerous options or the use of ‘advanced’ terms like symlink or source/target. Given that, I think we should view Commander One as a software aimed at the already skilled user. And in that view, it’s a great tool.
Commander One is also written entirely in Swift, Apple’s new development language. Swift is still young, so it’s exciting to see a production quality application written in language not only because of its speed, but also because it serves as a proof of concept: real apps can be written in Swift.
The first thing you’ll notice when you launch Commander One is that it’s is a Finder “alternative,” not a Finder “replacement.” That’s because the Finder cannot be fully replaced anymore than Windows Explorer can be: it’s a low level system component, integrated into virtually every aspect of OS X. The file picker from “Open” and “Save As” dialogs? The box that opens when you mount a disk image or another volume? That’s Finder. What you can do, and I have done, is set Commander One to launch as a Login Item.
Login Items
With 10.9 Mavericks, OS X introduced Finder tabs. These tabs, like a browser, enable you to run multiple Finder “views” at once. But their limit, obviously, is that they aren’t side by side for comparison, and they don’t make the draggability of files obvious. Commander One, conversely, is “dual paned,” which means that rather than tabs, you can actually see multiple folders side by side. Each of those views can also have tabs. Managing files is significantly easier when, rather than using separate windows which can easily lose their way in the active stack, folders are locked side-by-side.
You can perform a mass rename when you move files. You can queue large, disk-intensive operations for delayed execution, which can be critical, especially if you’re still using a platter hard drive. You can even use regular expressions for file selection.
You can search with regexes
The biggest challenge with Commander One is the learning curve of just how much can be done with it. It can do so much that it’s almost overwhelming, and in many cases, I found myself awing at the power without a specific use case in mind. I don’t know when I’d need to search for files in a directory using a regular expression. When I need to select all JPGs in a folder in the past, I just sorted by “Kind” and grabbed them all. In fact, the best reason not to use Commander One is that you’ve probably learned to live with all the limitations of your existing file manager.
On the other hand, the best reason to use it is that there may be a better workflow just clicks away. For example, if you find yourself often toggling hidden files, or copying file paths, or frequently performing operations on multiple files, you may be in for a treat. You can arbitrarily select files with the spacebar for a mass operation, but it’s a less finicky and less likely-to-lose-state solution than the current “hold Command” mass selection of the Finder.
That’s not all it can do: there’s native compression support (zip, rar, tgz, 7z, etc), view support for hex and binary files, a more robust network browser, root access, customizable hotkeys, and a history tool. Commander One is sometimes an embarrassment of options.
Hotkeys means total control over shortcuts
It’s not without fault. I did run into an error when I tried to remove a file that required elevated permissions. Unlike typical sudo prompting in OS X, I simply got an error refusing me access. While Commander One does support a “root” mode, the user mode simply threw an error.
An error with sudo operations
Commander One has tons of other goodies baked in: iOS and MTP management, terminal emulation, native mounting of FTP/SFTP/Dropbox, and network browsing, the list goes on.
So, the question is, will I be keeping Commander One as my file manager? Absolutely. And you should too, because it’s free! Although some features are stowed away in the “PRO Pack,” the majority are available to you right now. Your muscle memory may not allow you to replace all basic file management actions, but there are certainly times when the convenience of Commander One will win out, and you’ll find those fringe scenarios where the powerful commands of Commander One will come in useful.
You can find Commander One at Eltima.com. Commander One supports OS X 10.11 El Capitan.
I just want to say that AmigaOS had this for a long time.. With Directory Opus be one of the best solutions. Dopus as its called is also released for Windows, and makes Windows to a useful operating system. The strength of MorphOS, with its Ambient screen is that its taken the best from Dopus and implemented into the OS itself. Its nice to see that MacOS is actually getting there also
It goes without saying that the king of Orthodox File Managers (two-panel) managers on Windows (or anywhere) is Total Commander. It has all the features mentioned in the article and more.
It is probably the best known current implementation of the concept started by Norton Commander all those years ago.
It’s a nice article, but I found the lack of the historical perspective or comparisons with TC kind of weird.
It’s all good, but the king is still Far Manager, because it seamlessly combines command line handling and dual-pane file-manager.
MS-DOS had Norton Commander, which is the reason why ” Commander” in a file manager name is usually code for “Orthodox File Manager”. You can see this on Windows with Total Commander, on *nix (and Cygwin and DJGPP/DOS32) with GNU Midnight Commander, on Android with Ghost Commander, and in Java with muCommander. Hell, muCommander and Midnight Commander are both available for OSX, the former as a dmg and the latter via “brew install mc”. Midnight Commander in particular has most of the features of this thing’s “pro pack” gratis, including FTP, SFTP, and virtual filesystem support for rar and 7z.
Edited 2015-10-26 21:56 UTC
I guess DOpus has never been ported under Linux? What a shame, I still remember it as one very effective tool …
I’ve been using Path Finder since the Leopard days, it’s very good and a mature product.
It’s very much like Directory Opus in many ways.
http://www.cocoatech.com/pathfinder/
I love KDE’s Dolphin split windows option and could never understand why most file managers don’t offer this feature.
I agree; if more file managers were as flexible as Dolphin there would be little need for extra tools like these. I find that with Dolphin there is always a mode that is useful for my current needs, and that changing between modes is quick and easy.
Good to know, good from now
Edited 2015-10-26 18:30 UTC
Just a nitpick: Explorer is replaceable. LiteStep is probably the best known shell replacement available, and is still being developed (maybe. Last update looks to be 3 months ago)
Talisman is also still being actively developed, but it isn’t free. There are others, too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_alternative_shells_for_Windows
Also, not listed
http://www.winstep.net
No, it’s not. Even if you replace the interface and launch a different shell, explorer’s functions and views are integrated in so many other places that you cannot replace it. Any attempt to do so will essentially brick your Windows installation. The best you can do is launch a different shell which can, to some extent, hide explorer’s ui.
Have a look at Double Commander. Double Commander is a Total Commander clone, but unlike Total Commander is open source and cross platform.
It’s written also in Pascal and on linux it has a Qt and a GTK version.
I haven’t tried the OSX version, but I assume it’s as good as the Windows and Linux versions.
http://doublecmd.sourceforge.net/
While Total Commander is perhaps not open source, the author maintains it thoroughly and is open to suggestions. BTW it is free to use and have no limitation. Why this constant moaning about source openness ?
Well, the main page (http://www.ghisler.com/) says it is Shareware, not free. You can use it legally for 30 days, after that you are required to buy it. It is the good will of the programmer that he doesn’t enforce this after 30 days.
As for open source question, at least it is a guarantee that the project may live after the author abandons it or sells it for whatever reasons. Plus, as DC itself uses open-source and cross-platform libraries, it can be (and is) ported to various OS-es. TC, as the author says, cannot (at least, not without a lot of work) be ported because of its heavy use of win API and components.
Edited 2015-10-27 08:48 UTC
I’d like to add a recommendation for MuCommander. It’s old and only runs with Java 6 but is irreplaceable in my multi-platform environment.
I too hate Finder – not only is it unfriendly, but every iteration has a new problem.
try trolcommander, it’s an updated mucommander fork
http://trolsoft.ru/en/soft/trolcommander
The death of the ZFS for Mac dream, was the death of the Mac OS as a forward thinking Operating System for me.
For all the greatness that gets heaped on Steve Jobs, his inability to get a ZFS deal done is a real blemish, IMHO. If I were Sun, I probably would have found a way to do it. Death to the poorly working OS X server, would have been my only non-negotiable. And hey, it died by itself soon after.
Seriously, if all macs had ZFS formatted drives from the factory. I’d never. Never, Never. Never I tell you! Use windows ever again. I’m just now getting comfortable with BTRFS on linux, but still a little weary.
A deal with Sun/Oracle isn’t needed for ZFS.
It was once released under the CDDL, and is compatible with the APSL sources that Apple releases. People at the Illumos project, and FreeBSD, have been keeping it current. Apple could switch right now if they wanted.
Well, I’ve heard a couple stories why. One concerned a lawsuit by NetApp against Sun that Apple was afraid of. The other is detailed here in ars technica:
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2009/10/apple-abandons-zfs-on-mac-os-x…
Looking at the details of the suit, I suspect it wasn’t much of an issue – it was already going on for years before Apple’s announcement, and came to an end shortly after their initial announcements.
However, licensing does make sense – not that CDDL is incompatible with APSL (I don’t think it is), but that Apple wanted to be able to release it under its own licensing.
But, it could be that Apple already knew they were winding down the XServe, meaning there wouldn’t have been much wide-spread interest in ZFS. They might still be rolling their own FS, though.
Who knows.
I think they might have been able to use the open sourced version, but they may have been looking to not manage and continue to follow all of sun’s updates, in the fears that they might take dev private. Which, I think they did. Trying to maintain compatibility and feature set with a closed source version, is kind of a nightmare if you care about compatibility.
I think time machine was there answer to this idea of low cost easy backups. Probably icloud was also a contender. I’m not sure if they really care about local data anymore. Good enough, is probably good enough.
ZFS is coming to Debian! Debian’s legal team has concluded that they can package ZFSonLinux and distribute it, so expect to see it as a DKMS package in Stretch or Stretch+1.
There’s also ZFS on FreeBSD and Illumos if you prefer BSD or SysVR4 to GNU. Really, OS X is the laggard here.
ISTR that HFS+ is still in use to avoid breaking apps like Photoshop, which have low-level hooks to the filesystem.
Yeah, freaking photo shop. I would be surprised if it really still had those. And I also wouldn’t, because Adobe.
ZFS was, or is, never going to be a great general purpose filesystem, and using it as the default filesystem for a desktop is rather silly. ZFS’s niche is as a storage filesystem spanned across lots of loose disks on top of server grade hardware.
Forking and extending UFS2 was the better option, but they didn’t do that.
Care to expand upon that? I understand it has some features that don’t make sense in a casual single disk desktop, but detecting/protecting against bitrot is pretty important ,right? At least I think so. And the cow snapshots are pretty neat for back ups ( which is why I think Apple missed an opportunity with the time machine and ZFS).
I have previously run open Solarius and some crazy bsd variant with zfs as default. It worked pretty well for the basic testing I did. Was awesome for getting back to a known good system state.