When comparing Far Manager vs FileVoyager, the Slant community recommends Far Manager for most people. In the question“What are the best file managers for Windows?” Far Manager is ranked 7th while FileVoyager is ranked 20th. The most important reason people chose Far Manager is:
Far Manager's interface encourages keyboard operation - all actions are easily accessible with keyboard shortcuts, you can quickly record macros for any repeatable action, there are no screen redraws if it is not necessary and that makes everything faster.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Keyboard-oriented
Far Manager's interface encourages keyboard operation - all actions are easily accessible with keyboard shortcuts, you can quickly record macros for any repeatable action, there are no screen redraws if it is not necessary and that makes everything faster.
Pro Open source
Released under BSD license.
Pro Two-panel interface
Pro Many plugins
There are may of them, and you can write them in any languages, including Python.
Pro Editor with syntax highlighting
Every Far feature is also true for its editor. You can setup an external editor if you like, but the included editor works really well and features syntax highlighting.
Pro Easily recorded macros
Hit "Ctrl-." and start recording your boring sequence. Hit "Ctrl-." again to assign it a key. You can use Lua if you need more advanced macros.
Pro Numeric sorting option
E.g. readme-9.txt before readme-10.txt
Pro Extremely fast
Pro Offline context help
Just press F1 when you need it. No internet connection or browser is required.
Pro Themeable
Fully themeable, allowing you to change the colors of every part of the interface.
Pro Scrippting support via LUA
Pro Free
Pro Modern look & feel
Pro Highly customizable
Pro various display modes
Browsing in various display modes (like report or thumbnail modes)
Pro A lot of out-of-the-box features
FileVoyager offers a (nearly) universal file viewer, a (nearly) universal archive format support (integrated 7-zip), a (nearly) universal image and video support, a hash tool, a file and folder comparison.
Pro Actively maintained
Pro Quick preview
Render multimedia files (including M3U, PLS, ASX, WPL, MPCPL and XSPF playlist formats)
View ebooks and comicbooks including PDF, EPUB, MOBI, FB2, DJVU, CBR, CBZ, XPS, … (Powered by SumatraPDF)
Syntax highlighting for virtually any source code language/format (Powered by Scintilla)
Render final view for formats supported by Preview Handlers (like Office files, PDF, pictures, …)
Support many character encodings (SBCS including various ANSI implementations, UTF-8, UTF-16, EBCDIC)
Display in flat or hexadecimal for any format
Pro Synchronize folders
Compare files or folders.
Pro Play virtually any Audio or Video formats
FileVoyager relies at once on installed codecs, on WMP and on VLC
Pro 7-zip integrations
Pack and unpack ZIP, 7Zip, GZip, BZip2, XZ, Tar and WIM formats
ARJ, CAB, XAR, Z, RAR, LZH, LZMA, ISO, WIM and many others
Pro file operations containers
Usual file operations (rename, copy, move, link, delete, recycle) in the containers listed above and even between them
Pro Easy browsing
Browse disks, folders (real or virtual), shares, archives and FTP/FTPS in one unified way
Pro Portable
Cons
Con Blocking operations
Operations such as copy, move, delete, etc are blocking, and you have to wait for them to complete before you can continue.
Though you can cancel the operation with the escape key.
Con Only for Windows
Con Always uses monospace font
Which makes long file names look extremely wide
Con Does not support scrolling with mouse
With plugin
Con Text-based interface
Far Manager does not use a GUI like most windows applications nowadays. This may prove difficult to use for people who are not familiar with text-based user interfaces.