| In the world of Linux there is always a choice to make in Desktop Environments, Media Players, Windows Managers, and File Managers... etc. But I will focus on a File Manager in this post. In Linux you have many file managers, so many that I can't list them all right now. There are some command line based, GUI and all sorts of flavors and optimized for different purposes. Some of them are Nautilus, Dolphin, Thunar, and these file managers are the default for GNOME, KDE, and XFCE. I will take Dolphin. Dolphin is the default File Manager for KDE, and I am telling you KDE is a very good DE and Dolphin earned it place in it. It has numerous features that makes your browsing through files experience much more pleasant. If you wish to install it just run this command in your terminal: Code:
sudo apt-get install dolphin
If you are in GNOME it will install some KDE libraries with it too but don't worry this is normal. If you are in KDE you already have it installed so you can enjoy it right away.
After installing it I went into the menu and opened it. This is how a default Dolphin windows looks like.
The interface is very clean, it has 2 side panels, a Places panel and an Information panel. The information panel proved to be very useful for me since you can get all the basic informations about the selected folder. See that plus sign on that folder? If you click it the Information panel will show informations about the parent folder of the selected folder, this gave me a break from right clicking on a blank field and clicking properties, very cool feature. But if you take a look on the Information panel you will see some thumbnails on that folder. Those thumbnails represent the contents of a file or folder. This makes easy finding a folder with a specific content. But wait a second, you don't need to click each file or folder to get that! You can toggle the Preview Mode from the navigation menu, right under the menu bar. All contents of all currently displayed folder will be shown making your life easy.
Here is a screenshot with Dolphin in Preview Mode:
Notice that only 3 folders have a preview because the others have no content!
An another feature of Dolphin is its Split View Mode. Here is a screen shot just to give you a hint:
With split view you can easy compare the contents of two folders and as you can see the Information panel is still there. But wait a second, if you look more carefully you can see that the preview mode is still available. Now thats a big plus.
Dolphin has many view modes including Column, Detail and Compact. And the slider from the bottom of the windows allows you to adjust the size of the icons in an instant.
I decided to see the preferences menu of this program. Here is some screenshots:
Its very simple and the categories make orientation easy. I will not talk about this much , instead I will post some screenshots for you to make your own impression:
The only annoying thing I found about Dolphin is that folders opened with a single click and not with a double click, but this is already a matter of preferences. This can be easy disabled from the Dolphin's Preferences.
For me this program could replace Nautilus or Thunar in any day of the week and any second, I will just keep testing it for a while just to make sure. Hope you enjoyed it. Sorry if it was too long.
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