Far Manager (short for ''File and ARchive Manager'') is an

orthodox file manager A file manager or file browser is a computer program that provides a user interface to manage files and folders. The most common operations performed on files or groups of files include creating, opening (e.g. viewing, playing, editing or p ...

for

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

and is a clone of

Norton Commander Norton Commander (NC) is a discontinued prototypical orthodox file manager (OFM), written by John Socha and released by Peter Norton Computing (later acquired in 1990 by the NortonLifeLock, Symantec corporation). NC provides a text-based user i ...

. Far Manager uses the Win32 console and has a keyboard-oriented user interface (although limited mouse operation, including

drag-and-drop In computer graphical user interfaces, drag and drop is a pointing device gesture in which the user selects a virtual object by "grabbing" it and dragging it to a different location or onto another virtual object. In general, it can be used to ...

, is possible). Far Manager was created by

Eugene Roshal Eugene Roshal (; born 1972) is a Russian Software engineering, software engineer best known for developing the RAR (file format), RAR file format, the WinRAR, WinRAR archiver, and the FAR file manager. His contributions have significantly impacte ...

, and has been under development by the ''Far Group'' since 2000. The project's

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

branches (2.0 and 3.0) are

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

(under the BSD-3-Clause license). All branches are available as 32- and 64-bit builds. Far Manager is often viewed as a very customizable file manager and text editor, and a free alternative to

Total Commander __NOTOC__ Total Commander is an orthodox file manager, i.e. it features two file list panels (selectable via tab key) and a Command-line interface, command line. It supports Tab (interface), multiple tabs for each panel. Total Commander is deve ...

Features

Far Manager features an internal viewer and editor, customizable user menus, tree views, file search, compare, integrated help, and a task switcher for its tools. Its standard functionality can be expanded with macros (which allow scripting) and plugins. Far Manager's default interface combines two file panels with a

command prompt A command-line interface (CLI) is a means of interacting with software via commands each formatted as a line of text. Command-line interfaces emerged in the mid-1960s, on computer terminals, as an interactive and more user-friendly alternativ ...

. Panels may be fully customized as to which columns are shown and in which order, and operations may be done to and from either panel. The file panels support wildcard selection, advanced filtering, sorting and highlighting. The file panels and the command prompt are both active at the same time (they are interacted with using different keys), and most features can be accessed using keyboard shortcuts (the key bar at the bottom displays the

function key A function key is a key on a computer or computer terminal, terminal computer keyboard, keyboard that can be programmed to cause the operating system or an application program to perform certain actions, a form of soft key. On some keyboards/com ...

actions for the currently held down

modifier key In computing, a modifier key is a special key (or combination) on a computer keyboard that temporarily modifies the normal action of another key when pressed together. By themselves, modifier keys usually do nothing; that is, pressing any of the , ...

s).

Extensibility

Far's standard functionality can be greatly extended with macros (written in Lua scripting language, primarily used to record keypress sequences) and plugins. Standard plugins installed by default include

FTP The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a standard communication protocol used for the transfer of computer files from a server to a client on a computer network. FTP is built on a client–server model architecture using separate control and dat ...

, Windows network, extensible

archive file In computing, an archive file stores the content of one or more files, possibly compressed, with associated metadata such as file name, directory structure, error detection and correction information, commentary, compressed data archives, sto ...

support and temporary panel (sandbox) virtual file systems, a process list, print manager, filename case converter, and several editor plugins to format, wrap, and otherwise alter text. Third-party plugins are available from the PlugRing repository and plugin announcement forum. Some popular plugins include

regular expression A regular expression (shortened as regex or regexp), sometimes referred to as rational expression, is a sequence of characters that specifies a match pattern in text. Usually such patterns are used by string-searching algorithms for "find" ...

search and replace (both in the text editor and across multiple files),

syntax highlighting Syntax highlighting is a feature of text editors that is used for programming language, programming, scripting language, scripting, or markup language, markup languages, such as HTML. The feature displays text, especially source code, in differe ...

and auto-completion for the text editor, SFTP/ SCP and

Windows Registry The Windows Registry is a hierarchical database that stores low-level settings for the Microsoft Windows operating system and for applications that opt to use the registry. The kernel, device drivers, services, Security Accounts Manager, a ...

virtual file systems,

7-zip 7-Zip is a free and open-source file archiver, a utility used to place groups of files within compressed containers known as "archives". It is developed by Igor Pavlov and was first released in 1999. 7-Zip has its own Archive file, archive forma ...

integration, a

hex editor A hex editor (or ''binary file editor'' or ''byte editor'') is a computer program that allows for manipulation of the fundamental Binary file, binary data that constitutes a computer file. The name 'hex' comes from 'hexadecimal', a standard numer ...

and a picture viewer (which overlays a DirectX surface over Far's console window). Wrappers are available which allow using some

plugins with Far Manager, and vice versa. Plugins can be developed using the native C/Pascal API, or using wrappers which permit plugin development in other platforms and languages, such as .NET (including PowerShell), and Lua.

Linux, MacOS and BSD version

far2l project develops port of Far Manager v2 working on Linux,

MacOS macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

and BSD systems. As of February 2021, the port successfully builds and the most common functions work. Among ported and working plugins are Colorer, MultiArc and TmpPanel. There is also the new NetRocks plugin implementing network connections via

FISH A fish (: fish or fishes) is an aquatic animal, aquatic, Anamniotes, anamniotic, gill-bearing vertebrate animal with swimming fish fin, fins and craniate, a hard skull, but lacking limb (anatomy), limbs with digit (anatomy), digits. Fish can ...

, SCP, SFTP, SMB, NFS and

WebDAV WebDAV (Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning) is a set of extensions to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which allows user agents to collaboratively author contents ''directly'' in an HTTP web server by providing facilities for conc ...

. As of January 2022, the project has moved to the beta stage, support for python and lua scripts has been added. far2l also supports "terminal extensions". Although FAR2L itself is a TUI application, it can run in GUI or TTY backends modes. While TTY backend can run in any terminal (like, for example,

xterm xterm is the standard terminal emulator for the X Window System. It allows users to run programs which require a command-line interface. If no particular program is specified, xterm runs the user's Unix shell, shell. An X display device, dis ...

), it can also run inside a built-in terminal of GUI mode far2l, gaining capabilities not available on "regular" terminals (such as recognizing all possible keyboard key combinations, even with keyup events). Also, the "host" far2l can provide shared clipboard access and desktop notifications. Those extensions can be used by running TTY far2l inside an SSH client session opened in "host" GUI far2l (or by using SFTP/SCP protocols in NetRocks to run remote far2l via "execute remote command" feature). far2l is available in

Ubuntu Ubuntu ( ) is a Linux distribution based on Debian and composed primarily of free and open-source software. Developed by the British company Canonical (company), Canonical and a community of contributors under a Meritocracy, meritocratic gover ...

Linux starting from version 24.04, and can be installed using sudo apt install far2l command.

Licensing

Far Manager is available under the BSD-3-Clause license. Originally, Far Manager was available as 40 days

shareware Shareware is a type of proprietary software that is initially shared by the owner for trial use at little or no cost. Often the software has limited functionality or incomplete documentation until the user sends payment to the software developer. ...

for everyone except for citizens of the former

USSR The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...

countries, who could use it as freeware for non-commercial use only. On 26 October 2007, the

source code In computing, source code, or simply code or source, is a plain text computer program written in a programming language. A programmer writes the human readable source code to control the behavior of a computer. Since a computer, at base, only ...

for the Unicode development version (1.80, later renamed to 2.0) was released under the BSD-3-Clause license. On 17 May 2010 the 1.x branch has also been released under the BSD-3-Clause license, though without source code.

References

External links