Far Manager: files and archives in Windows

Far Manager is a critical piece of software for me to be able to use a computer comfortably and efficiently. Used it all the way from Windows 98 to Windows 7, and now Arch Linux.<p>Especially since LuaJIT support was added in Far 3 (and far2l Linux port&#x27;s fork, far2m), I made it to be able to execute a line of Lua code under cursor or in a block of selected text, and print the result (if any) to the editor, turning the editor into something conceptually stronger than a REPL or a command prompt combined.<p>So now I have two upgrades over command prompt: file-focused, as with Far by default, and Lua-focused.<p>I&#x27;ve been joking that Far Manager has become my real OS. It also was a source of endless debates with my Linux friend, who insists that everything I can do in Far, he can do in Bash quicker, but that seems true only because he doesn&#x27;t know Far keyboard shortcuts.

Related: I&#x27;ve been using Total Commander &#x2F; Windows Commander for quite some time. Still use it occasionally even to this day. If you&#x27;re into orthodox file managers, check it out.

I&#x27;ve been using FAR for the last 20+ years on a daily basis and it hasn&#x27;t crashed a single time for me. I like its minimalist UI, but a quite complex functions are only a click or two away and various plugins extend its functionality in useful ways (for example, Netbox for ftp access). I think it&#x27;s a fantastically useful and robust tool.

I read somewhere that if you can read Russian, you could get a license for free (I guess it&#x27;s generally free now). This is supposedly why many Russian competitive programmers use Far Manager (with some plugins) for editing code. This includes Tourist, who I am told is one of the world&#x27;s best.

Far is a fantastic piece of software, with an excellent pedigree.<p>Same key bindings, look and feel as Norton Commander, with lots more functionality, but added with considerable thought and restraint. Delightful to use and very well done. Not everyone&#x27;s cup o&#x27; tea, granted, but worth taking for a spin if only to see a very faithful reproduction of the grandfather of all two-pane file managers.

Fun fact: Eugene Roshal is author of both Far Manager and WinRAR. However Far Manager is distributed as a 7z archive.

I fail to understand how two-panel file managers didn’t become the default. It seems that in the 90s Norton Commander and it’s derivatives were widely used on DOS PCs. They made many file management tasks so much easier. Why don’t we see them around nowadays?<p>I know that FAR and probably Midnight Commander are still around, but I just don’t see anybody using them.

Interesting coincidence, I&#x27;ve just talked about this in the article I published yesterday: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;alinpanaitiu.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;complex-simplicity-of-static-websites&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;alinpanaitiu.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;complex-simplicity-of-static-w...</a><p>FAR Manager has been the place I lived as a Windows power user, I remember using it with a highly customized ConEmu which I carried around as a portable installation on a USB drive <i>(on my keychain)</i><p>Whenever a relative or friend asked me to troubleshoot some problem on his PC <i>(which was quite often)</i>, I plugged that drive in and instantly looked like I probably know what I&#x27;m doing.<p>I remember having plugins for navigating into DBs, archives, FTP, Android ADB filesystems, Windows Registry, processes, MP3 ID3 tags, MTP storage devices etc.<p>I felt like a monkey trying to type Shakespeare when I bought a Mac and did not have FAR Manager anymore. With fish shell and fzf I fulfilled most of my use cases nowadays on Mac.<p>Now, if only there was an Everything file search alternative, there really is nothing that matches that on macOS.

I am not a fan of Far Manager, but since this is an orthodox file manager, here are some good alternative GUI managers for Windows: Total Commander, Double Commander, Unreal Commander, FreeCommander XE, MultiCommander.

How&#x27;s this better than Midnight Commander? I saw a colleague using Far and we found that, as far as our usage went, both had a similar set of functionality.

I&#x27;ve never used this program before. How does it handle symbolic links, hardlinks, or junctions?

The very existence of Far Manager makes me stay on Windows.