Integration
Can they synergise with other tools to further their usefulness?
No man is an island, it is said, and neither is a file manager. All of our offerings on test here can integrate with other tools to further their utility. Dolphin integrates with KDE’S partition manager, Kompare (for file comparisons) and Filelight (disk usage), but one reason we included it in this Roundup was because it can integrate with non-kde tools too. Not only can it work with the other search applications mentioned previously, but it also works with Gparted or OPENSUSE’S partitioning tool.
Krusader, unlike its slightly schizophrenic sibling Konqueror (which is both file manager and web browser) is no longer included in most KDE installs. It can integrate with Kdiff and Krename, as well as Thunderbird for email and myriad file compression and checksum utilities. On first run the rather extensive settings page (Konfigurator) is shown from whence you can choose various programs for it to interoperate with. If you’re feeling dangerous it can be configured to write directly into archives via the krarc I/O slave. And it would be remiss to ignore the option for queueing commands – very handy when copying lots of large files from different places.
To access network shares, 4Pane requires the showmount and nmblookup programs from the NFS and Samba packages respectively. Its ability to mount ISO images is particularly handy, especially if you’re a disc editor (or a virtual disc editor this issue). You can choose which means to do root commands: su , sudo , gksu , etc. Midnight Commander can do basic syncing operations with Git or CVS repos, but you’ll probably prefer to issue those commands yourself from its input box. Ranger excels at synchronising with any and all version control systems (VCSES). There’s an option to turn on VCS awareness, either globally or for particular directories. When activated it will show you the sync status with respect to the current branch. It can preview PDFS as text (the default) or images via the pdftoppm command. You’ll find example code to connect with CDEMU if you want to mount ISO files. If you can code it you can connect it to anything else.