Tuesday June 13, 2006

muCommander - a Java-Powered, Cross-Platform File Manager

I am addicted to two paned, Norton Commander-like file managers. I do not require anything fancy though, I was quite happy using the command line version of Midnight Commander. My work laptop was recently upgraded to MacBook Pro. Unfortunately I find the PowerPC emulation (Rosetta) rather disappointing, apart from performance penalty it has a tendency to hang the entire OS, especially when running Open Source stuff (try PPC-compiled MPlayer).

Being lazy to attempt to recompile Midnight Commander manually I made a quick research for alternatives. It led me to muCommander, a free, cross-platform app written entirely in Java. The author (Mexence Bernard) is using a Mac as well, when run under OS X the application takes advantage of Apple's Java libraries providing a nearly native look & feel (OS X-style menus, native keyboard shortcuts are yet to be seen though)

• Virtual filesystem with FTP, SFTP, SMB and HTTP/HTTPS support

• Quickly copy, move, rename files, create directories, email files...

• Browse, create and uncompress ZIP, TAR and GZip archives

• Universal bookmarks 

• Multiple windows support

• Customize the look and feel to your taste

• Never leave that keyboard again, shortcuts are provided for almost everything

• Available in 11 languages : English, French, German, Spanish, Czech, Simplified & Traditional Chinese, Polish, Hungarian, Russian and Slovenian

Cool stuff, highly recommendable to Java desktop sceptics!