 So, if you have been following my channel for any amount of time, you know that I have a thing for file managers. My favorite Linux app of all time is Crusader. I talk about Crusader way more than is healthy, I'm sure, and I have touted its praises over and over and over again on this channel. It's kind of become a obnoxious honestly. To be completely honest, I have a love affair with Crusader. I've blogged about it. I've made many videos about Crusader. I've talked about it on the podcast. I've talked about it in person with people, like actually in real life with people. It's a little weird. My obsession with Crusader, but for me, Crusader is perfect. It has a lot of options. It remembers position. It has all of the features that I need. It's overly complicated to be sure, but it does all the things that I like. And I've been using it now for over two years, and it is just a fantastic application. And I have no reason to switch away from it. But that doesn't mean that I can't look at other alternatives just to see what else is out there. That's kind of the way Linux works. You might be having a fantastic experience on your distro of choice, but that doesn't mean that you don't go shopping on other distros every once in a while. That's why we have VMs, right? So I have been taking a look at a file manager called Double Commander. Double Commander has been around for a very long time, and it is a very good file manager. I'm just I'll just I'll spoil the end of the video for you right now. It is a very good file manager, but it has some qualms and it has some quirks that I want to talk about today. And I want to show you Double Commander and talk a little bit about it. So let's go ahead and jump in. But before I do, if you could hit that like button because it really does help the channel. I hate being a YouTuber about it, but apparently likes or where it's all at these days. So if you could leave a like, I'd really appreciate it. So now let's go ahead and jump in and take a look at Double Commander. So this right here is Double Commander. I haven't made very many tweaks. I've changed the font. That's about it. I've been using it for about a week now, and I haven't found many things that I've had to change or wanted to change. The UI of it is not as pretty as Crusader. So this right here is Crusader. This is the file manager that I've been using for the last part of two years. It's highly customized for me. I have it set up exactly the way I want it. I've changed the key binding and stuff like that. And I like this UI better than Double Commander. It's not even really close. I think that the UI of Double Commander is overly cluttered. And yes, you can change all that if you want to, but it does take away some of the functionality if you make those changes. So I've kind of left it where it's at for right now. So really, my biggest qualm about Double Commander has always been. So I should stop before I move on and just say that I've tried Double Commander before, but the thing that has always scared me away is this. And I might as well just get this right out of the way. These are the settings for Double Commander. Now, if you've ever used Crusader, you'll know that Crusader has a ton of options. If I go back to Crusader and go to settings and configure Crusader, Crusader has a ton of options. You know, you can make a lot of changes. There's tabs for different options and stuff. And you can go and make a whole bunch of changes. And it's, you know, overly complicated as you would expect a QT slash plasma application to be. But for Double Commander, there are way more options. OK, and they're not nearly as organized as the ones you get with Crusader. So this always scared me away. And I know a lot of people is scares away because there is a ton of stuff here. And it's not well explained at all. Honestly, to tell you the truth, it does have documentation. So if you go to the website, you can find documentation. I wish there was some in-app help so I didn't have to go to a browser to find that documentation. But, you know, there is documentation for all this stuff, but you kind of have to go to two different places to find it. So this part here always scared me away because it's unorganized and there's just a ton of stuff here. And some of it's just like this directory hot list that I'm on right now. What even is that, right? It's not explained. It's not explained how you get to it. And the only reason I know how to get to it now is because if you go spulunking through the menu system up here and you go to commands, you'll find that the directory hot list can be accessed with control D. So if I hit control D, it'll actually show you your directory hot list, which is basically just bookmarks as far as I can tell, which is weird considering the fact that there's also a favorite system. So you can mark your directory as favorites. You can mark tabs as favorites. You know, so it has these two different things. I'm not sure what the difference is and it's not well explained inside of the application. So it's it's it's weird, right? But I know I'm starting off negative, but I just want if you're going to try this application, I want you to know going in that it's going to be overwhelming, kind of like Crusader is. If you've ever tried Crusader and you've never had if you've never tried Crusader before, I should say it can be very overwhelming the first time you launch it because it's got a lot of features. It's got a lot of UI elements. It's got a lot of extraneous options and buttons that aren't well labeled unless you hover over them, you know, and it's just it can be overwhelming. Double Crusader is the same. It's overwhelming right from the start. And I get that it was overwhelming for me too. And it's one of the reasons why when I was searching for options before I found Crusader, I bypassed double commander because it was just too overwhelming for me. So now that I've gotten that out of the way, let's talk about some of the things that I really, really like about it. So first of all, let's talk about the thing that I just talked about options. I know that I said it was overwhelming, but I also do like a file manager that has a ton of options. That's one of the reasons why I like Crusader. This has a ton of options. So once you get past the disorder of it all, the fact that it has a ton of options is a good thing. So there is a lot of stuff here. I'm not going to take you through all of it. Honestly, I could be here for days if I went through piece by piece and showed you everything. So you can change the way that it will unpack things when you encounter a compressed file. You can change how auto refreshes. You can change some of the behaviors. Now some of this stuff I think could probably go in other places. So like a lot of times when you hear behavior, or at least when I hear behavior in a file manager sense, I'm thinking of how the mouse reacts. So you can change how the mouse reacts. One of the coolest things I've found actually, just to stop here, is that there are multiple options for that behavior. So usually in a file manager, you have two. You have double click and single click. That's usually it. This has one extra. So if you have a, if you want, you can have it. So single click will open folders. But in order to get to a file, you'd have to double click it. So it's kind of a combination of the two normal options. That's actually really cool. And I haven't enabled it because I haven't gotten used to it because it requires a little bit of extra muscle memory. But it's really astonishingly smart because if you, if you were a plasma user back in the day when single click was the thing, you probably got used to single click and I did. Like I really was a single click fanatic. It was the only way is actually the first option I would change you no matter what file manager I was in. I'd always change it to single click. But since I started using Crusader, which doesn't actually have single click capability without some finagling, I've gotten used to double click with double commander. I have the option of kind of having the best of both worlds. And that's awesome. So that's one of my favorite features of this. I haven't like said, I haven't turned it on yet because I haven't quite gotten used to. I keep finding myself double clicking on everything. So I've kind of just left it the way it is. But I'm going to eventually start training myself with this option here. And I think it's going to be great. Now, as you can see, there are other options. So you can change how the folders or how the tabs are displayed. You can change where they're at. You can change the top or bottom. There are, you know, where you can show the tab close button. If you don't want, if you want to, you can close duplicate tabs when the, when you close the application. So if you have two of the same open, you can close them. I would not want that to be an automatic thing. Because what if I wanted those two tabs to be open? I don't know, but that's an option for you. Obviously, you can change all the hotkeys if you want. Now, one thing I will say here is that it's not, let me see if I can make this actually full screen so you can actually see it. It's not the it's not well ordered and it's not user friendly. Now, I will say that they do a good job of telling you what each of these commands actually does. But if you were to ignore that part, especially if you, if you were in this view here, like if you're in a filing window manager and that's that third column was kind of cut off and you didn't see it. You'd probably wonder what the commands actually were. Now, some of them are self-explanatory. Some of them are not. So it's a weird way of doing it. But you can, I mean, if I just scroll here for a minute, I mean, I'm still scrolling. I'm still scrolling. You can change the hotkey for literally everything. I mean, you can change the hotkey for literally everything in Crusader too. And I would say the UI for changing the hotkeys slash keyboard shortcuts in Crusader is better. But the fact that you can go through and change like literally everything is really, really, really cool. Another thing that allows you to do is you can change the fonts. That's one thing that I have done is I've changed the font because the original font for default is just it's too small and it's not well rendered. I don't really care for it all that much. So I've changed it to my favorite font. You can change all the fonts, by the way. And I don't think, to be honest with you, I don't think that that's something that you can do in Crusader. To be honest with you, I don't know for sure. Let's go to advance. Where's the colors maybe? I'm not actually sure where that would be. From what I can tell after going spelunking, because it's been actually been a while since I've been in the Crusader settings because I've had it set up for myself for so long. It doesn't look like you can actually change the fonts. You can change the colors, but not the fonts themselves. I'm assuming that's just because it's expecting you to change your fonts from the like the plasma settings or whatever. And, you know, fair enough. But with Double Commander, you can change the fonts, right? You can literally change everything. You can change the icon. So if you have different there's one here called file associations. Where's where did that go? This is my biggest problem. It is alphabetical, I believe, is what is the way these are sorted. So file associations should be somewhere up here. There it is right there. File associations. But anyways, if you wanted to, you can go through and change what the icons are for different file extensions and what actions are taken when you click on them. It's very complicated a little. You know, it's fairly complicated, but you can make all those changes right here. And that's, again, really cool. If you're into super micromanaging your file manager, kind of like I am, this gives you an awful lot of options for doing basically anything. You can change the colors. You can change the layout. You can change how it handles renaming, how it handles file operations. Basically, anything you can imagine changing in a file manager, you can change in Double Commander. It's really good. And it does offer you a discombobulated UI to do all those things. But if you can get used to it, the power here that it gives you is fantastic. Now, all of that said, I have some qualms that I didn't cover earlier. The biggest one is that everything is in a separate window. So for example, if you go over here and you hit the search option, the search option opens up in a separate window. Now, there is a search option that happens inside of Double Commander itself. So if you hit slash, kind of like if you're in VIM, and then you search for something, so I'm going to search for music. And then you hit enter. You'd expect it to go to music, but it just goes back a level, which is probably because that's what was highlighted. Like highlighted is up a level. That's why if you hit enter. So I'm assuming that there's like a some kind of keybinding here that I'm missing. So if I just type music, oh, actually, if you get rid of the slash, it works. Okay, see, I just figured out something else. So by default, it has a slash there. But if you if you just search for music with that, it's going to search root, I would assume. I don't know. So there is built in search. But again, if you want more advanced search, it's external. Another thing that is external is the operations viewer. So this is not that as big of a deal as I was thinking it was because the honestly, the operations viewer for Crusader is also external. The operations viewer is basically what comes up when you're transferring files from one directory to another, showing you the progress. My biggest issue here is that it's not floating. So like if I were to transfer a big file in Crusader from one directory to another, it would pop up in a little floating window. It's fine. And with double commander by default, the operations thing here is just a full screen window that comes up in a tiling window. Now you can, of course, change that in the settings. But this is the default and that bothers me because like I said, everything that you want to do, I mean, there's there are many different options here that I could show you like, for example, if I want, let's just say I wanted to add something to the directory hot list. So if I, if I hit control D, let me go to music hearing, hit control D and add current tab to current directory, that's going to actually pop up the settings. I'm going to hit okay. Cause it's now added that I hit okay. Again, then it will close, right? So it's a little bit of a jarring experience when you do, you're doing some kind of operation inside of double commander and it actually pops you out into another window. I don't really care for that all that much. Another thing that I don't really care for again, and I talked about this earlier is the UI. So they have duplication of everything instead of the UI. So if you want to get to your drives, there's obviously the drive panel up here, but there's also the drive panel here. And there's also a third place you can get to all your drives. And I forget where that's at, but you can obviously, as you can see it, you know, you have multiple options for getting there. Now that's again, something that you can change. You can get rid of this toolbar all together. You can then just completely ignore that this thing here exists if you want. So, you know, you have options to change that. But again, it's a little bit messy out of the box. Also, all these icons and stuff. Yes, you can find out what they are by hovering over them. And they all have associated key bindings and they do show you those in the tooltips, which is nice, but they're super small. And there's a lot of space there. I would like them to be just a tad bit bigger. Again, you can change that. But by default, they're really small. And you can also, if you want to, if we opened up these options again and we go down here to toolbar, you can change everything about these. You can remove them. You can change the order of them. You can actually, actually, now that I think about this, you can actually change the icon so that their icons are bigger. Like I said, everything here that you want can change. I wish you could change the space between the icon. So as you make them bigger, they kind of start to overlap a little bit. I'm assuming that if you did this, probably that would change. Yeah, there you go. So you kind of got to change both of them. So like I said, everything that I complain about, you can change, except for the opening and outside windows thing. That seems to be something that's kind of permanent. But you have to change it. And you have to know that those features are there. Not only that, but you have to know where those features are. So a lot of times you have to kind of go spulunking into the options to know where, you know, those particular options are. And I'm just gonna, oh yeah, just seriously, that's so much better. It's not overly big. They're well spaced out. It's just much, much better. So like I said, you can change everything. So the one thing here that my biggest criticism by far is the options and the lack of organization. But really what you desperately need in this options panel is the ability to search for the options that you want. And that is not here. So you have to know where things are and to give them credit, all of the stuff that they have here is well organized in terms of alphabetical order. And it's in places that make sense. So all the tab options are here in the tab section. They're not, you don't find some tab options in some other section, which is good. But there's no way of searching. And if you don't know precisely what you want or precisely where the thing that you want is located, you can spend quite some time searching through these particular options. So that is my biggest criticism is that the options panel is, I wanna say it's clutter. It's just not easy to get through without having spent quite a bit of time there, if that makes any sense. So yes, double commander is quite fantastic and it has a ton of options. I should talk about some of the simple options that I really like about it, but you can just assume that it has the options that I'm looking for. So it has the ability to have as many tabs open as you want. Obviously it's double pane, which is one of the things that I absolutely have to have. I've gotten so used to having double pane, it's just something that I can't live without. Now I know there are a lot of other file managers out there that have double pane, so you can use double pane in Thunar and Nemo and stuff like that. But the problem with their implementation of double pane is that when you come back to Thunar or Nemo or whatever, it doesn't remember that you had double pane. Now I think they've changed this since I used those full time, but I'm not sure. With double commander and with crusader, they're double pane by default. You can't even actually turn the panes off. So that is, because I'm always gonna use double pane, that's not a big deal at all. And it does remember positions. So if I have a whole bunch of tabs open and I close it, so right now you can see I have two tabs open up here, I have three tabs up here, if I close that, and then I open it up again, you can see that it remembered those tabs. Now it takes the remembering of position quite seriously and it takes it further than just the tabs you have open. So you can, if you want to, save all of the settings so that you can remember those settings in a future iteration of double commander. Another thing that you can do if you want to, which is really quite cool, is you can save your current tabs to a file. So if you wanted to take all of your tabs to another computer, you could do that. That's, I mean, that's not something, as far as I know, that's not something crusader can do. I mean, it wouldn't surprise me if it can do it and I've just never kind of stumbled over that, but as far as I know, that's just something that double commander does. So that's cool. You can also save your tabs to bookmarks to favorites, also to that one thing, which has double, it's the directory hot list. Again, not sure what the difference is between those two things. Maybe one of them is just for directories, not actually sure what the difference is, but you can save to both of them and you can use key bindings to save the favorites, which is nice. You can use key bindings for basically all the stuff as I showed you. So that's another thing that I really like about it. So it has all the features that I really like about a file manager. It's more customizable than crusader even, which is just astonishing to say out loud. And it's just a really good file manager. It's also just as fast as crusader. So one of the things that crusader, I really liked about crusader is that it is just a snappy program. It allows you to move between different directories and stuff like that, just as fast as you'd expect out of any file manager. And especially when you consider how many options and features and stuff both crusader and double commander have, the fact that they're this fast is really good. So overall a fantastic file manager. So the question then becomes, of course, Matt, are you switching away from crusader to double commander? And the answer to that question is interesting. So I think so, honestly, to tell you the truth, I really do like double commander quite a lot. And I think I'm going to keep messing around with it for quite some time because there are a ton of options that I even haven't gone through yet. Like I've only been messing around with for a week and I've only made it like a 10th of the way through the options panel. And I just keep pressing buttons to see what things do. You know, I'm like a kid that way. So it's a process for me. And I'm going to continue playing around with it because I think it can be my file manager going forward. Whether or not it actually ends up being that long-term, I don't know because I do, like I said, crusader is my baby. It's a fantastic piece of software and I really, really like it. And it will hurt me to go away from it, but I do like double commander quite a lot too. Now, one thing I didn't cover is appearance in terms of themes. So it seems to be easier to theme crusader than it is to theme double commander. I haven't played much around with how double commander gets its themes. It may be pulling from my GTK theme. It doesn't look like it does though. I can't really tell because I don't use a really complex GTK theme at all. I think I just use Edweta. So I can't tell whether or not it's actually up. So I need to go through and play with double commander a little bit more to see how those things are, but it looks like it's just a random dark theme that it has kind of built in instead of pulling from an actual GTK theme. Because I think it's actually, I think it is GTK. I can't actually tell it is actually GTK. It's GTK 2. So that tells you how long it's been around because it says GTK 2.24.33 and we can actually see that in the about panel. So if we take a look at the about panel here, you can see that this is GTK 2.24.33. So this is a GTK thing. So I'm assuming that if I found myself a GTK 2 theme or a theme that supported GTK 2, it'd probably pull in that particular theme. I don't actually, the reason why it's just using a random dark theme right now is because I don't have a GTK 2 theme on my system. I don't think, not actually sure. I don't mess around with my GTK themes as much as you think I would. So yeah, so yeah, that is double commander. It is really good. I'm continue to play with it. If you are looking for a file manager that is super complex and has a ton of features and you get to nerd out about for a little while, definitely give it a try. It has been around for a very long time. It is still in development. The most recent update came in in like May 3rd. So a little bit over a month ago, there was an update to it. So it's still being developed. A lot of these file managers that are just kind of like passion projects for a small team, oftentimes they get abandoned. So like Space FM or whatever it's called, that was abandoned. So the fact that this has been going on for so long, it's really good. So it doesn't feel like it's gonna get abandoned. So that's good news. So that's it for this video. I spent almost a half an hour prior to editing talking about a file manager. You shouldn't sound so surprised because of course I did. So that is it for this video. If you have thoughts on Double Commander, you can leave those in the comment section below. If you liked this video, please leave a like. I would really appreciate it. Seriously, liking is the number one thing you can do to help the channel. So I'd really appreciate it if you dropped a like button. Yeah, smash the like button. I, that's just horrible. Anyways, thank you for watching. You can follow me on Mastodon or Odyssey, those links will be in the video description. You can support me on Patreon or on Patreon.com slash Linuxcast. Links for Liberapay and YouTube will be in the video description as well. Thanks to everybody who does support me on Patreon and YouTube, you guys are all absolutely amazing. Without you, the challenge wouldn't be anywhere near where it is right now. So thank you very, very much for your support. I truly do appreciate it, guys. Seriously, thank you for your support. Just thank you, thank you, thank you. Thanks everybody for watching. See you next time. I don't know why I always mess that last part up. It doesn't matter. See you next time.