Linux File Browsers

There's no shortage of file managers (or, file browsers) available for Linux. Here's an article that explores 10 of them:

http://tuxarena.blogspot.com/2009/04/10-file-managers-for-linux.html

I've tried out most of these, but I always go back to using Konqueror. Konqueror double as a web browser, but that's not the reason that I'm attracted to it.

What Konqueror gives me that the others don't is multiple split-screen viewing. Some of these file browsers, like Krusader or Dolphin, give you split screens where you can view two screens in one window. But as far as I know, only Konqueror lets you have more than two split screens. It's a feature that comes in handy for me so often that I end up going back to Konqueror no matter what other file browser I have installed.

A typical situation for me:

Below, I have Konqueror opened in Debian Lenny so that I can view the following directories: my /home directory; the /boot/grub directory; the /etc/apt directory; and the /mnt directory.



This gives me quick and easy access to several directories, and it's the main reason why I prefer Konqueror over other file browsers.

The above-mentioned article ends with the following: "As a conclusion, some say that ls and cd make up a file manager too, and I certainly won't argue against that ;-)"

I concur. Quite often, rather than opening a file browser, I'll go directly to the command line, cd to a particular directory, and run a ls command to view the directory's contents:

steve@debian:~$ cd /etc/apt
steve@debian:/etc/apt$ ls -al
total 44
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 2009-03-06 21:35 .
drwxr-xr-x 97 root root 4096 2009-04-03 09:11 ..
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2009-03-06 19:58 apt.conf.d
-rw------- 1 root root 0 2009-03-06 19:32 secring.gpg
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1244 2009-03-06 21:35 sources.list
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1228 2009-03-06 21:34 sources.list~
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2009-02-07 17:41 sources.list.d
-rw------- 1 root root 1200 2009-03-06 19:32 trustdb.gpg
-rw------- 1 root root 5801 2009-03-06 19:32 trusted.gpg
-rw------- 1 root root 5801 2009-03-06 19:32 trusted.gpg~
steve@debian:/etc/apt$

This approach is just as useful to me as using a GUI file browser, and provides pretty much the same info, but at a glance.