I prefer a lean Linux install, so I use awesome (window manager) on my netbook and Openbox on my desktop machines. I prefer minimalist tools, my choices of File manager included. Here I briefly describe my favourite file management tools in order of importance.

nnn

nnn (file manager) is my most-used tool, central to all my work on Linux machines. I just find it so whippingly fast to move around directory trees, and to move files and directories around. I configure it a little in my bashrc-console.

launching default applications

This is a fiddly matter, a good reason to not go minimalist like me, but choose a good integrated modern Desktop environment like the GNOME Shell or KDE Plasma 5, both of which are excellent and take care of most of your configurations. I prefer minimal, which takes a little more work. Default applications got me started with mimeo, which works fine, though I moved onto handlr, which (Is this repo dead? #74) still works well.

PCManFM

PCMan File Manager serves my needs on the odd occasion that I want a graphical file manager.

Edit > Preferences >
  General > Confirm before moving files into "trash can"  off-ticked
  Volume Management > Show available options  off-ticked
  Advanced > Terminal > urxvt

I make bookmarks for certain preferred locations.

In my bashrc-ob I have

pf () {
    nohup pcmanfm &
    sleep 2; rm nohup.out
}  # launch  PCManFM  on current directory

which lets me launch PCManFM from a terminal location.

Although I consider PCManFM minimalist, it does have a load of dependencies, as can be seen if I

pactree -u pcmanfm | tr '\n' '~' | sed 's/~/  /g'; echo

ranger

Took me a while to teach myself ranger (file manager), and it was worth it. It’s as fast as nnn, and more informative, but clunky for moving things around, so I use it more for looking than for doing. Most of my configuration can be seen in rc.conf.

fzf & jump

  • fzf is another game-changing tool that I rely on. I use it from the command line to quickly home in on something in a directory tree using its implementation of Approximate string matching. More frequently I’m using it via a few keybindings in my plugins.vim to rapidly fuzzy find in my vast number of text files.
  • I jump all day long to my most used directories.

find, fd, stat, chown, chmod, exa…

  • find (Unix) is powerful, though useful find commands need some crafting, so I keep notes to remind myself of useful examples such as find . -type l -ls # list all symlinks in a directory tree.
  • fd is an excellent abstraction of find, eg: fd -tl -HL -X rm # removes dead links
  • I have a few useful stat commands in my bashrc-generic.
  • Bring drive SDSSDA240G into my control: # chown -R jo:jo /run/media/jo/SDSSDA240G
  • Make my script executable: # chmod 755 $Obc/rc/importScreenshot.sh
  • exa (command-line utility) is such a handy file lister that I configure some one-letter commands in my bashrc-generic.
  • I’ve a few more simple commands configured in my bashrc-generic, things that I picked up here and there, such as counting file types.

CliFM