PCMan File Manager (PCManFM) is a
file manager application, developed by Hong Jen Yee () from
Taiwan
Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), is a country in East Asia, at the junction of the East and South China Seas in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, with the People's Republic of China (PRC) to the northwest, Japan to the nort ...
, which is meant to be a replacement for
GNOME Files
GNOME Files, formerly and internally known as Nautilus, is the official file manager for the GNOME desktop. Nautilus was originally developed by Eazel with many luminaries from the tech world including Andy Hertzfeld (Apple), chief architect for ...
,
Dolphin
A dolphin is an aquatic mammal within the infraorder Cetacea. Dolphin species belong to the families Delphinidae (the oceanic dolphins), Platanistidae (the Indian river dolphins), Iniidae (the New World river dolphins), Pontoporiidae (the ...
and
Thunar
Thunar is a file manager for Linux and other Unix-like systems, initially written using the GTK+ 2 toolkit and later ported to the GTK+ 3 toolkit. It started to ship with Xfce in version 4.4 RC1 and later. Thunar is developed by Benedikt Meu ...
. PCManFM is the standard file manager in
LXDE, also developed by the same author in conjunction with other developers. Since 2010, PCManFM has undergone a complete rewrite from scratch; build instructions, setup and configuration have changed in the process.
Released under the
GNU General Public License
The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the Four Freedoms (Free software), four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was th ...
, PCManFM is free software. It follows the specifications given by
Freedesktop.org
freedesktop.org (fd.o) is a project to work on interoperability and shared base technology for Free software, free-software desktop environments for the X Window System (X11) and Wayland (display server protocol), Wayland on Linux and other Uni ...
for
interoperability.
Dissatisfied with
GTK3, Hong Jen Yee experimented with
Qt in early 2013 and released the first version of a Qt-based PCManFM on . He clarified, though, that does not indicate any departure from GTK in LXDE, saying: "The GTK and Qt versions will coexist". The new PCManFM-Qt is a core component of
LXQt. In 2020 the
Arch Linux community ported PCManFM to GTK 3.
Features
PCManFM's features include:
* Full
GVfs
GVfs (abbreviation for GNOME virtual file system) is GNOME's userspace virtual filesystem designed to work with the I/O abstraction of GIO, a library available in GLib since version 2.15.1. It installs several modules that are automatically use ...
support with seamless access to remote file systems (able to handle
sftp://, dav://, smb://, etc. when related back-ends of gvfs are installed.)
* Twin panel
* Thumbnails for pictures
* Desktop management - shows wallpaper and desktop icons
* Bookmarks
* Multilingual
* Tabbed browsing (similar to a
web browser
A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used on ...
)
* Volume management (mount/unmount/eject, requires gvfs)
* Drag & drop support
* Files can be dragged among tabs
* File association (Default application)
* Provides the following views: icon, compact, detailed list, thumbnail, and tree on the left sidebar
See also
*
Comparison of file managers
*
LXDE
*
LXQt
*
Thunar
Thunar is a file manager for Linux and other Unix-like systems, initially written using the GTK+ 2 toolkit and later ported to the GTK+ 3 toolkit. It started to ship with Xfce in version 4.4 RC1 and later. Thunar is developed by Benedikt Meu ...
*
SpaceFM
SpaceFM was a desktop-independent, multi-panel, tabbed file manager for Linux. SpaceFM is built using the GTK+ toolkit. Available under the terms of the GNU General Public License, SpaceFM is free software.
Features
*Panels: each window can ...
References
External links
*
Free file managers
LXDE
LXQt
Free software programmed in C
Software that uses Qt
File managers that use GTK
Software that was ported from GTK to Qt
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