Figure 1: Midnight Commander file manager.

File managers have a curious, some would say unique, place in desktop computerdom. They seem to be only slightly behind text editors in their ability to trigger religious conflict among true believers. It's not hard to find instances of one user reacting to another's choice of file manager with, "You use what???", a situation that can quickly put the "personal" (as in ad hominem) back into personal computing.

File managers are also like text editors in that their users are very prone to exhibiting the "baby duck syndrome." This quaint term refers to the way baby ducks will "imprint" on the first entity they're exposed to for any length of time (be it a duck, a human, or whatever), and treat it as its mother. Editor and file manager users are much the same way -- they imprint on one set of features, keystrokes, and appearance, and often don't even consider looking for an alternative. I'm no different from anyone else in this regard -- I still configure the function keys in any editor I use to match the set I learned at IBM about a billion years ago on the mainframe editor XEDIT, and I always set the colors for marked blocks to the same scheme I've been using for years on desktop systems, whenever possible.

This imprinting is a natural side effect of the amount of time we spend with these programs, and the sheer number of low-level interactions (keystrokes, mouse clicks) we have with them during a work day. It's not hard to find newbies who think that the file manager is the operating system's interface.

This user behavior is also why many of the large, full-featured text editors don't just allow for the customization of key bindings (the actions attached to special keystrokes, such as ctrl-x-c in Emacs to quit), but they even come with pre-built sets of bindings and other settings to mimic certain other editors. To some degree we see a measure of this mimicry in Linux file managers, as there are a number that claim to be similar to Windows Explorer or the Methuselah of file managers, X-Tree.

This reluctance to change causes a problem, though, since there are probably as many file managers for Linux floating about the Net as there are text editors, and few users take the time to look for a better alternative. They don't even think about it. Generally the Linux file managers are serviceable if imperfect; unfortunately, and that's often enough to keep people from trying new options.

I spent some time recently downloading and testing various file managers, and found some interesting things, as well as a few pitfalls to avoid. Because of the personal nature of file managers I'll try not to inflict my opinion on the remainder of this column, except in well marked places.

Shades of Gray

I won't attempt to create a formal taxonomy of file managers (even my geekiness has a limit), but some basic classifications are obvious once you take a quick look at the different varieties. Note that some file managers -- Midnight Commander for example -- fall into several of these categories.

The first category is the single-pane, very simple file manager that shows you a mix of directories and files in a single "pane" of a window, typically without a tree representation of the directory structure. Since I consider these to be barely file managers at all, and there are so many other, far more functional, programs just waiting to be downloaded, I say no more about them here.

Next up are two-pane file managers,which show you two views of your file space, side-by-side, so you can more easily move files from one to the other.Within this category are numerous programs with an even wider range of features available, including ytree and Midnight Commander. Some of these programs are relatively straightforward, while some, like X-Files, take the "Whoever dies with the most buttons wins" approach to interface design. Which style you prefer is purely a matter of taste. This is one of the rare times, though, when it's not a good idea to trust your initial reaction to a user interface. (And admit it -- we all make those kinds of snap judgments when evaluating software.) I found that some of the file managers only showed their true colors after a few hours of use, and some grew on me quite a bit as I tried different tasks with them.

Figures 2 and 3: ytree (top) and XTC.

The third group is a real oddity --clones of the old DOS program X-Tree. This is a full-screen, character-mode program that uses two panes, one for a directory tree, and one for a file list, plus some screen real estate for function-keys and/or commands. X-Tree apparently has the same addictive qualities of certain controlled substances, based on the number of people I've encountered who use the original or one of the many clones available. There are several Linux entries in this group, including Midnight Commander and ytree, mentioned above, and xtc (). All the ones I've seen to date have been character mode programs that will run either on a console or in an XTerm window.

And finally we come to what I call the "full featured" file managers, most notably those that come with GNOME and KDE: Midnight Commander (GNOME) and KFM (KDE's K File Manager). These two are quite important for a couple of reasons. First, since each is part of its desktop environment, many people automatically lock in to using them, without giving much thought to alternatives. Second, they're more fully integrated into the desktop environment in terms of things like drag-and-drop support, making them easier and more natural to work with in some instances. Personally, I have some minor quibbles with both file managers, but I switch between them regularly and can still get my work done without trouble.