 I made a video a few months ago about a file manager that has been around for a very long time and I was repeatedly made fun of for that video simply because many of you don't understand why I was so excited about a file manager. Now I don't think that there's another Linux YouTuber out there that has made as many videos about file managers as I have. Brody might come close, but most of his are about terminal file managers. For me, it's all about the GUI. I'm sorry terminal for life, but in this case the GUI wins out. I'm sorry. But the point is is that I think I know file managers and that video that I made a few months ago was very enthusiastic about a certain file manager and that file manager was Crusader. Now Crusader is not for everyone. That is absolute truth. Like for the vast majority of people, they're going to be perfectly happy with Nemo or Dolphin or Nautilus or something like that. They don't need anything special when it comes to a file manager. They just need something that views files and they leave it behind. They probably don't even think twice about what file manager they're even using. That's normal people. Boring people. I should say. I shouldn't say boring people. They're just normal people. They can't help that they're boring. The point is, is that I'm obsessive about my file manager and I tend to switch a lot or at least I did. Now it's been a few months and I wanted to make a video updating you on the file manager situation on my computer because I'm still with Crusader. Crusader is amazing. It is my favorite app on Linux. Now I know that is a bold claim because I like Vim a lot. But for me, my favorite application on Linux is the one application that I would be kind of devastated without is Crusader. Now let me talk about why. So this is my install of Crusader. Now there's nothing here really that can't be done in other file managers. That's true. The dual pane nature of Crusader is not unique. A lot of file managers will have dual pane functionality. A lot of them are one time use only. So you have to open up the file manager, choose dual pane, use whatever you want. Then when you close it, it comes back single pane again. That's not really for me. I want dual pane all the time. Now there are a few out there that will allow you to always have dual pane Nemo and Dolphin come to mind. Those are both excellent file managers. But Crusader takes it a little bit further and it allows you to have different views on different tabs in different panes. So for example, in this one here, I have the tree view along with the selected folder view, which is just the basic thing, right? And then in this tab here, I have the image preview in a certain place so that when I click on something else, it shows me the image preview. And I can do this for every single tab. That's really cool, right? And it's not something that is really available in any other file manager except for probably Dolphin, which is basically the little brother of Crusader, I should say. So that's one thing that I really like. Another thing that I like is that the tabs are on the bottom. No, not a big deal. I could be perfectly happy with the tabs on the top. But I've gotten so used to them being down there. It just makes me happy that they're down there. It's silly. I know this whole video is silly. And my obsession with this application is over the top for sure, but I like it. Now the biggest feature that I adore the most in Crusader is that if I close this and then reopen it, it remembers where I was. Now that's not something that is universal across file managers. I really wish it was, and I think it really should be. I understand that most people just use their file managers and then go away and can continue on with their day. But for me, I always have this thing open. And I tend to have the same tabs open all the time. So there are certain ones here that are just always open. So on the left-hand side, I always have the thing that I'm editing for the channel on this side. So in this case, I just edited the podcast. Or if I happen to be ahead on videos, all my videos and stuff are in tabs on this side. And I want those things to stay there. If for whatever reason I shut my computer down, which I've been doing more often for energy reasons, I don't want those tabs to go away. On this side, on the right-hand side, I always have the miscellaneous tabs. But also there's a few that always are kind of mainstays. So the video folder here where all of my videos are recorded into. The socials tab, which has all of the little things that come up along the bottom of all my videos, that's here all the time. The logos directory where I've collected, I don't know, a couple hundred different logos for the thumbnails that I create and so on and so forth. I mean, it just goes on and on. Those are the tabs that are most always there. And when I close them, I don't want to have to open it back up and reopen every single one of those tabs. Because I'm just going to open those tabs again in the same spot. Not only that, but if I had to do that every time, I'd have to select the view. So I'd have to go down here, click this little arrow. And then I have the tree view. If I wanted the image preview, I'd have to click on this one here. And then if I wanted to have it at the top, I'd have to invert the view so that it appeared at the top, it'd be a pain in the butt. I would not want to have to do that every single time I opened up the file manager. The only other file manager I know that remembers position like this, at least that is still being actively developed, is Dolphin. Again, Crusader's little brother. So if it was just all that, I would still be enamored with Crusader. Like just those things, the tabs along the bottom remembering position, the neat way it does different views per tab, the dual pane mode, I would be happy with just that. But Crusader does way more. So another thing it does is it allows you to move things around in interesting ways. So if for whatever reason, this layout didn't suit me anymore and I wanted to switch them around, it's quite easy to do. So I can just swap sides. And that's kind of cool. Again, not something that I've ever seen a file manager do. Again, not a big deal, but it's just something that's kind of neat. Another thing that'll allow you, that you can do is if you don't like the horizontal mode of this, you can switch to the vertical mode. Now, I don't personally care for this. It's too squished for me. But if this is something that you like, you could do it. Then there's this tool here. So based on the tabs that you have open in focused mode, so the ones that are actually in front of you, you can open up this synchronizer thing. And what this will do is that is exactly what it sounds like. It will take two directories and synchronize them. So think of sync thing. So there's this application called sync thing where you can set up two folders on different machines, and it will always look for differences and it will sync them so that they're always exactly the same. This is exactly like that. Only it's not automated. It's something that you have to run on your own. And the cool thing about this for me is that I do all of my recording and all of my storage for the videos that I'm working on on a 500 gigabyte SSD, all of my videos and stuff from this channel, the podcast, everything is on that SSD. As you might imagine, that space runs out quick. So once I've gotten to the point where I need to transfer stuff off from there, I use this tool here to transfer stuff from the SSD to a fuller on a bigger hard drive. But I don't always want to keep different directories for whatever. I want to combine them so that they're always kind of in sync. But then and then delete the ones off from the SSD. And that this tool can do that as well. So once it's done transferring stuff, it can then delete the ones off from one side or the other. Now, I will admit that it is very complicated and it's definitely not for everybody because it takes a little bit of getting used to. And you want to make sure you know what you're doing before you go about deleting anything, because if you delete something that you weren't supposed to, it's gone. Now, I know that there are other tools out there that do this. So this is not unique to Crusader, but it's built in, right? And that's cool. Now, I could talk for many, many more minutes about Crusader and all of its features. It has, if you have the dependencies installed, it has a built in meld slash diff mode. So you can compare two files by content. That's really cool. It has a built in packer so it can either zip things or unzip things, create tar balls, that kind of thing. It can mount your drives, obviously, which is obviously typical for a file manager. It can mount network drives, which is also really cool. Also fairly typical for a file manager, but it's a little bit more robust. And it can handle SSH connections, FTP connections and more. So what's wrong with Crusader? What are the things that I use about this that kind of bother me? So the one thing that had took me a long time to get used to is the lack of single click. Now, this is a big debate in the Linux community, whether or not selecting something with one click and opening it with that same click is the way to go or double clicking is the way to go. Some people are on one side, some people are on the other side. It doesn't really matter which one for me personally. For the longest time, I was on the click to select and open. So just a single click behavior on all of my file managers. That's the way I went. And that's the default in KD for the longest time, right? But getting that to work in Crusader is kind of hard. If you don't have plasma installed and the first time I used Crusader, I didn't have plasma installed. And the reason why that's hard to do is because KD moved all of the choices for that option out of the settings panels and into the actual KDE settings panel. So if you don't have that installed, you can't change it. I've gotten used to now double clicking to select. But it was one of those things that I had to get used to. The other big problem here is that this requires a lot of dependencies. Like it's very much a KDE application in that regard. It has a ton of dependencies. Now, the cool thing about it is that they're not all automatically downloaded. So for example, you don't get the diff functionality. You don't get a lot of functionality for unzipping certain files. You have to add those in yourself. If you don't need them, you don't need to install them. That's kind of cool. When you first open up Crusader for the first time, it'll tell you the things that you have support for with the things you have installed. And then it'll also give you the application you need to install in order to enable that functionality. The only downside is, is that one of the dependencies that it doesn't install for you is the ability to do image previews. You can't have any image previews out of the box. You have to install a dependency called KIO extras KIO dash extras in order to get image previews like this here. And that bothered me for the longest time. Now I'm used to it, but it's again, one of those things that you kind of don't know about because weirdly it lists all of these dependencies that you need in order to get certain functionality. But the image preview one is not listed. I had to go into an old Linux Mint forum to find out the answer for that. So that was a big deal and kind of pissed me off for a long while. If I hadn't been able to enable that, Crusader would not have been my file manager for very long because image previews is very important. So other than those two things, there's really not anything that I don't like about Crusader. And I know what everybody's thinking. You just made a 15 minute video on a file manager. Not only have you made a 15 minute video on a file manager, but this is the second video you've made on this file manager. Matt, you have a problem and that's true. Like that is definitely a problem that I'm so seem to seemingly obsessed with this file manager, but it is so good. Now, like I said at the beginning, Crusader is not for everybody. The huge amount of dependencies is going to turn a lot of people off. And there's nothing that you can really do about that. If that's something that bothers you, you're never going to like Crusader. But if you can get past that and you need this type of functionality, like if you need the dual pane stuff that's always there, if you need the remember position functionality, there's nothing better than this. I think it's better than Dolphin simply because it works better outside of KDE. Like it really does. I've noticed that for whatever reason, Dolphin sometimes just doesn't appear when you launch it in a window manager. It will just show up the border like the border will show up. The application never shows up. It's really weird. I don't know what that's going on there, but I've never had that problem with Crusader. Also, there's a ton more features here than there is in Dolphin. And if you like a lot of features like I do, this is for you. So so if you have comments on Crusader, you can leave those in the comment section below. If you have tips on how I could get over my obsession with file managers, you can not leave those comments because I'm never going to get over my obsession with file managers. It's just it's not a problem for me. I'm happy with what that is. OK. So you can follow me on Twitter at the next cast. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash Linux cast. Before I go, I'd like to take a moment to thank my current patrons. Robert Sid Devon, Patrick, Fred, Traymer, Megalyn Jackson, Jules D. Bay, Sebrega Linux, Gary, Samuel, Mitchell, ArtCenter, J-Dog, CarbonData, Jamie, Sean, Oden, Martin E, Annie Ross, Merrick, Kamp, Joshua Lee, Peter A, Crucible, Derek Bennett, Sixth, Parmesan PM. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time.