fman vs Far Manager
When comparing fman vs Far Manager, the Slant community recommends fman for most people. In the question“What are the best file managers for Windows?” fman is ranked 6th while Far Manager is ranked 7th. The most important reason people chose fman is:
Windows, Mac, and Linux are supported.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Works on all operating systems
Windows, Mac, and Linux are supported.
Pro Simple to use
Pro Makes finding commands *by name* easy
Pro Slick
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
Cons
Con No (text) file viewer
Con No explicit bookmark support for directories
It though remembers the visited directories and allows to search in this list in most-recently used order and by name.
Con Mainly for key-board-orientated users
The interface is most naturally navigated by arrows and keystrokes. The target market is software developers.
Con Has no menu bar
Hence it is not well suited for visually orientated users which find or remember commands by using a mouse and a menu. Even the fman's hero Sublime Text uses a menu bar.
Con Requires email address to download
Doesn't say what it will do with this data. It is in contrast to the new laws in Europe where only necessary information is allowed to be collected. A download should not require an email address.
Con Still quite buggy
So, for example, sorting only is remembered if triggered by command and not be clicking the table column header using the mouse.
Con Settings can't be found by the GUI
You need to know which files to edit.
Con Default dark theme
No choice between dull-dark or fresh-light.
Con No portable bundle available
On Windows only a net-installer is available.
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.