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Some Mac users are perfectly happy with Finder, which admittedly is all you need for file-moving applications most of the time. That’s especially true when you consider that by clicking the second view button (one of the group of three or four buttons usually found at the top of a Finder window) you can show all the files in list mode, which makes it easier to display a large number of files. And under Leopard, Cover View (the fourth button of the group in Finder) is far superior to the thumbnail view you may find in some other programs.

However, there are those of us that have come to know and love the dual-pane style of file manager interface, first introduced long ago by the old DOS Norton Commander program. Modern Commander-style programs often do dual duty as a file manager and file transfer program, using FTP, SFTP, or some other protocol(s) for file transfers to and/or from remote systems.

Naturally, in the Apple world, there is a program you can buy that will provide you with dual-pane file management. But if you find that Finder works for you most of the time, but occasionally you just need to see the old familiar Commander-style interface, here are three FREE options that won’t disturb the moths inside your wallet.

muCommander

The first is muCommander - this is our favorite because it best emulates the Commander-style interface, and it’s also cross-platform, which means it will run on any operating system with Java support (Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, *BSD, Solaris…). The list of features is as follows:

• Virtual filesystem with local volumes, FTP, SFTP, SMB, NFS, HTTP and Bonjour support
• Quickly copy, move, rename files, create directories, email files…
• Browse, create and uncompress ZIP, TAR, GZip, BZip2, ISO/NRG, AR/Deb and LST archives
• ZIP files can be modified on-the-fly, without having to recompress the whole archive
• Universal bookmarks and credentials manager
• Multiple windows support
• Full keyboard access
• Highly configurable
• Free Software
• Available in 18 languages : American & British English, French, German, Spanish, Czech, Simplified & Traditional Chinese, Polish, Hungarian, Russian, Slovenian, Romanian, Italian, Korean, Brazilian Portuguese, Dutch and Slovak

The only real drawback we have found with muCommander is that it can be a bit balky to respond if you have been using other applications. We suspect it may be doing some memory swapping or something of that nature, but occasionally you’ll see the infuriating spinning beachball of death for a few seconds when you switch back to an open muCommander session. There’s supposed to be a new version out soon that we hope will fix that. The other problem is that the interface is a bit Spartan, and the unlabeled buttons at the top which aren’t as intuitive as we’d like, although mousing over a button does reveal its function.

The one thing we’d really wish for is that placing the marker over a file and hitting the spacebar would reveal the contents of the file in Quick Look, instead of simply marking the file (for a multiple copy/move/delete operation), but that might be too much to expect given that it’s a cross-platform program, and Quick Look is very Mac specific.

Xfolders

Our next free dual pane file manager is Xfolders. This is a native Mac application but surprisingly doesn’t have a couple of the basic features we have come to expect in such programs. Here’s the Xfolders feature list:

• Completely for Tiger re-written cocoa application.
• Uses the new technology of Mac OS X Tiger.
• Full integration of the Finder, thus support of all file operations from and to the Finder.
• Drag & Drop between both filelists and the Finder.
• Support for all important file operations.
• Info dialog for simply changing the file and folder attributes.
• Intelligent path navigators for both file lists.
• Bookmarks & manager for folders.
• Direct access to important system utilities.
• Navigation with the keyboard ala Norton Commander.
• Integrated, detailed Spotlight search.
• Integrated image browser.
• Integrated terminal.
• Versatile search and compare possibilities.
• Zip archive support.
• Flat or 3D Unified look.
• Supports the following languages: English, German, Italian, French, Spanish
• Optimized for the PowerPC G5 processor, but remains compatible to G3 and G4 processors!
• Universal binary: Compatible with Intel based Macs!
• Xfolders is freeware!

The first thing you notice about Xfolders is that it was last updated for Tiger, though it seems to work well enough under Leopard. But the second thing is that the “View” and “Edit” buttons are missing - that’s right, there’s no built-in text editor or viewer, and you aren’t even given the option to shell out to an external editor or viewer. Worse yet, when you try to use the program, you find that you can’t double-click a directory to change to that directory - you must either right-click and select open (which only works when going downward in a directory tree), or you must hit the Enter key, which means that you can’t keep your hand on the mouse and move around in the same way that you can with most programs of this type. And there’s no way to transfer files using FTP, or any similar file transfer protocol. There are just too many things missing from Xfolders for us to consider it really useful for much of anything more than copying, moving, or deleting files, but we admit that it integrates with the Mac a bit better than muCommander. For a heavy session of (re)organizing files on your Mac, Xfolders might be just the ticket.

Midnight Commander via Rudix

Midnight Commander is a dual-pane file manager that is popular in the Linux world. It is invoked from the command line, which may make it quite useful in an emergency situation when your Mac won’t boot in the normal manner, but you can boot to a command prompt. It is also quite useable from a terminal window or from iTerm, and we recommend the latter because it will pass mouse clicks through to Midnight Commander whereas the standard Mac Terminal application does not.

Midnight Commander doesn’t even pretend to be a native Mac application (because it isn’t!), but there may be times when you don’t care about that and simply want to get things done. And if you have any past experience with Unix or Linux, you may prefer Midnight Commander, especially when transferring files to and/or from a remote *nix system. I couldn’t find a feature list for the program, but if you just navigate the menus you’ll see what’s available.

In the past, installing Midnight Commander on a Mac required a certain level of geekiness that was probably beyond the ability of many Mac users. Thankfully, that is not so much the case now, following the introduction of a package called Rudix that makes it almost drop-dead simple to install many common Unix utilities. And thanks to our friends at the Michigan Telephone, VoIP and Broadband blog there are now some instructions for installing Midnight Commander that make the process as easy as following a recipe in a cookbook.

Our recommendation? Install all three of these file managers! They are all free, and all are useful for different types of jobs. But if we had to pick just one, it would be muCommander, hands down.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article is an example of how we will tend to bypass the commercial software that other Mac sites promote (heavily, I might add) and show you where to find the freeware gems that others won’t tell you about. We have no objection to you buying the commercial software if you actually use it frequently and find it worth the money, but honestly, how often do you need to use something other than Finder for file management? We just don’t need to go into a dual-pane file manager often enough on the Mac to justify paying for one (such is not the case when we are forced to use a Windows machine - the limitations of Windows Explorer usually induce us to install Total Commander right away - and by the way, users of Wine or Crossover on the Mac could probably also install Total Commander, but its usefulness is rather limited because it doesn’t know anything about Unix-style file permissions and ownership on the local system).

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