What if you could access most of these features from within a single software? Or better yet, think of a file manager that packs a majority of these tools so that you don’t have to open separate applications for your day-to-day tasks. Directly to the point, you’ll be glad to know that such tools exist, and one of them is Double Commander which we’ll be discussing in this article.
Double Commander
Double Commander is an open-source, dual-panel file manager that’s available for various operating systems including Linux. It is inspired by Total Commander but contains some new features. The application is still in beta phase, presumably because all the features envisioned for it haven’t been implemented yet – it’s currently under heavy development. Note: we’ve used Double Commander version 0.7.2 beta for this article.
Download and Install
The download and install instructions for Double Commander are there on its official website. You can proceed by clicking links corresponding to your OS. For example, in our case (Ubuntu) we clicked the link corresponding to GTK2 in the GNU/Linux section and then selected Ubuntu. Given that we’re using Ubuntu 14.04, the following set of commands downloaded and installed the file manager on our system: Once installed, you can launch the application by running the following command:
Features
Here’s the UI of the application.
You can see that there are two side-by-side panels listing contents of the same directory “/usr/lib/doublecmd.” Needless to say, you can click the double dot [..] entry in the beginning of the content list to go to a directory of your choice. For example, I opened “/home/himanshu/Desktop” in both panels.
I know you’ll be eager to know about the various tools that I mentioned in the introduction of this article and how you can access them. Let’s begin with the comparison tool which you can access by heading to “File -> Compare by Contents.”
Of course, you need to select a couple of files before launching this tool. Here’s a screenshot of the compare tool in action.
Moving on, just next to the “Compare by Contents” option is the “Multi Rename Tool.” As the name suggests, this option lets you rename multiple files in one go. Just select the files that you want to rename and click this option, and you’ll see the following window.
As you can see, I selected two files named “screenkey” and “screenkey-edited.” Now suppose the aim is to append a “-new” text at the end of the name of both files. For this just add this text after the “[N]” in the ‘File Name’ text box, and you’ll see that the “New File Name” column at the top shows the updated file names.
Now, click the “Rename” button at the bottom to complete the operation. Next up, the “Pack Files…” and “Extract Files…” options that follow the “Multi Rename Tool” option (described above) in the “File” menu. They let you create an archive and extract contents from an archive, respectively. An important thing worth mentioning here is that you can easily drag and drop a file into an archive, and Double Commander will make sure that it’s added to the archive. Move over to the “Mark” menu, and you’ll see various available options, including a couple that let you copy the file names as well as names with complete paths of the selected files.
Similarly, head over to the “Commands” menu, and you’ll see a “Run Terminal” option which – as the name suggests – opens a command line terminal from within the editor.
Keep exploring these main menus, and you’ll find some very useful features. Moving on, the next set of important functionalities is located at the bottom of the Double Commander UI.
Clicking the “View F3” button opens the built-in file viewer to view files in hex, binary or text format, while the “Edit F4” button launches the internal text editor. Similarly, the other buttons let you copy, move, and delete stuff, as well as create a directory and exit the application. Each panel window has a set of symbols over it (image shown below) that act as clickable buttons and serve as shortcuts to directories.
Suppose you want to go to root directory. Instead of clicking the “[..]” entry again and again, you can just click the “/” symbol from the list shown in the image above. Similarly, “..” takes you to the parent directory, “~” takes you to your home directory, and “<” opens the current directory of the other panel. The “*” entry (that the set show above begins) requires a bit of special mention. Clicking this button lets you open special directories – for example, directories represented by environment variables. The following screenshot should make things more clear.
There are also options to add your current or selected directory in the special directories list.
Conclusion
Double Commander is a powerful file manager that’s not at all difficult to understand or use – all you need to do is to spend some time with it. While all of what we covered here is just the tip of the iceberg, it should be enough to get you started. If you are a heavy Linux user, I am sure you’ll benefit from Double Commander. Go ahead and try it.
