Jatecblog

Personally, Nautilus is my file manager of choice. It has plenty of built in features, and anything that isn’t included, I can add it myself with Nautilus Scripts. However, while not bloated by any means, it is a little heavier then a plain file manager needs to be. If you have decent hardware, it will be fine, but if you a lower-end setup, or want to squeeze out every drop of speed, you may want to consider an alternative. While their are plenty of choices out there, here are two of the most popular that I’ve had experiences with.

Thunar

This is the default file manager for XFCE, a desktop environment designed to be lightweight while not being bare-bones. In many ways, XFCE is similar to GNOME, with a smaller footprint (incidentally, it also natively supports things neither GNOME nor KDE does, such as built in compositing). If you want speed, you could ditch GNOME entirely for XFCE, but if that isn’t an option for you, you can just take Thunar. It is blisteringly fast, you will almost never see a second of lag with it. It isn’t quite as feature-rich as Nautilus, but it has most things you will need for simple file management, including an “Open Terminal Here” option. It can also be expanding with the (somewhat limited) selection of plugins. One of the only complaints against it is the “Open With” menu doesn’t always show all applicable programs. Here is a way to make Thunar your default file manager.

PCMan File Manager

PCMan is a lightweight file manager, that is somewhat similar to Nautilus. It can appear very similar after a tiny bit of tweaking, but there is no getting around the fact that it includes way less features. This can be a good thing, though. The creater explains his goal as, “The goal of this project is not to build a huge yet powerful file manager, but a slim and useful one.” PCMan fills that rather well. It is very fast and lightweight, comparable to Thunar. Despite its lack of features, there is one thing it has that frustratingly few other GTK file managers have: tabs. The ability to load several tabs in one window is marvelous, and it is extremely irritating that Nautilus can’t do it. The shortcuts for tabs are nearly identical to Firefox, so users can pick them up in no time. A strong drawback is that there is no way (to my knowledge) of setting PCMan as the default file manger. In short, PCMan really has only two things to brag about, speed and tabs. However, it does both of those extremely well.

As I said before, there are plenty of other file managers out there. These are two GTK apps that are fairly similar in use to Nautilus, so they would be easy to switch to . They are both lightweight, so can run quite a bit faster then Nautilus. However, that lightness comes at a price. Neither is as feature filled or customizable (PCMan in particular) as Nautilus. However, if you want something simple that is fast and easy to use, give either of these a try.