Panels and views

Clean views and flexibility are what we are looking for here.

The default Dolphin toolbar includes a button to split the main window in two, making it dual-pane when you need it to be. Middle-clicking opens a folder with its own tab. A left-hand panel contains the Places icons. Rather than this being switchable to a tree view, the tree view panel occupies the same area, which is vertically split if both are activated. On the right, an information panel can be activated. This gives a larger preview of the selected file along with detailed information. Finally, the Terminal panel can be activated, although it prompts you to install Konsole, the KDE terminal app, before it can be used. Once in place, this follows directory changes, and directory changes in the Terminal panel are reflected in the main window. Running all panels at once is possible, and all panels can be resized and torn off to be rearranged around the main window.

Nemo’s side panel can be switched between Places and tree views. A second main panel can be activated for dual-pane operation, but there doesn’t seem to be a way of activating that with an icon. There is also an optional command-line panel.

As ever, Thunar does a good job of offering all the expected features. The left-hand panel is switchable between Places, tree view and an image preview panel, but they can’t all be activated at the same time. Middle-click can open a folder in a new tab rather than a separate window, but this is disabled by default.

Like a great deal of the Midnight Commander design, its use of panel layout is pretty much locked into a particular way of working. There are a few options, such as being able to split the panes vertically rather than horizontally, and it has a commandline pane at the bottom.

Lastly, Krusader starts off as a two-panel file manager, but each panel can be split again. This sub-panel can display a tree view, a file preview or a disk usage graph. Like Midnight Commander and Dolphin, a command-line terminal window can also be activated.

Thunar goes a long way beyond just offering the file management basics. Here, we’ve switched on the split view, handy for some file-copying situations.