[issue636] Suggest PFM, the best FM

[Tong Sun]

New submission from Tong Sun <suntong001 at gmail.com>:

Hi, 

How do you define the best file manager? To me, the only standard is
how powerful it is. Thus, for me the winner of the best file manager
is pfm, http://p-f-m.sourceforge.net/, because there is no other
file managers that are more powerful than it.

To justify my claim, let me begin with a quote from vshnu: "when one
is concerned about file manipulation and management ..., a CLI can
be a frustratingly terse interface... A GUI file manager can address
this problem, but then you... have lost the advantages of the CLI."

I.e., pfm has the normal advantage of a GUI file manager, but its
unique feature that allows you to manipulate and manage file and
file names using the CLI interface makes it stands out from the
crowd. Moreover, there is no other file manager that aligns better
with the spirit of grml than pfm's *text based* GUI interface.

To explain it, let me begin with a (long) story,

- Normally, filename completion, wildcarding and the "xargs" command
  can cover 99% of my file/directory manipulation and management
  needs.

- If "xargs" is not powerful enough, I use doeach
  (http://ostatic.com/doeach), which allows me to deal with source
  file's path, name, and extension separately, and it can build
  redirection, piping easily on the command line. E.g., piping the
  selected files through gz and redirect the results in another
  diectory, named as backup.<org_name>.`date -I`.<org_ext>.

- But there are times when a visual point-and-shoot file selection
  system beats wildcarding. This is the only time that I need file
  manager, i.e., for arbitrary file selection (and operation).

The file manager of my choice is PFM. it allows me to build
arbitrary file operation shell command (with the arbitrary selected
files). That's the main reason, when back in DOS days, I preferred
pfm than NC (OK, I admit that I'm biased).

For e.g., a very simple example, covert a bunch of *selected* files
as .png files. PFM is able to do:

 covert file1.gif file1.png
 covert file2.Gif file2.png
 covert file3.JPG file3.png
 . . .

Using a simple PFM command:

 convert =2 =1.png

Another more simpler one is, I keep all the pictures from my digital
camera on disk, but also maintain a much much smaller list of
picked, good ones. I use pfm to pick the good ones, and create
symlink in another directory to the pick ones. You can think of
other cases as well.

My point is, there is no other file manager that can help me to the
above except pfm (I've (almost) tried every file manager in OSS
world). Moreover, the pfm maintainer, Rene, is very helpful too.
FYI, there is a new release that recently came out, with lost of
good improvements.

I wish that pfm will be included in grml repo. 

Thanks

----------
messages: 1952
nosy: suntong
priority: wish
status: unread
title: Suggest PFM, the best FM

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