If you're a macOS user, your relationship with Finder, the Mac's file and window manager, might be a love-hate one. You might appreciate its simplicity, but at the same time, its limited options can be frustrating. That's why some users turn to solutions like Path Finder. If you also need something more for managing your files, I'm going to show you the tool I usually use: Commander One.
Commander One, a dual panel file manager
Commander One is, broadly speaking , a dual-pane file manager . What does this mean? It's simple: in the application's main window, you'll always see two views displaying the contents of two folders or drives. These can be two folders located on the same or different drives, and it can even be a folder hosted on a network drive or even on online servers like an FTP server or the cloud of some compatible services that the app supports.
This double-pane layout is what, together with the rest of the options and tools, enables more efficient and faster file management than you could do through Finder natively. Of course, depending on the profile of each one, managing files in this way will be more or less comfortable. But if it is for more advanced uses and profiles, it is very helpful.
To give you an idea quickly, with Commander One what you can do is manage files wherever they are. What's more, here are the main features and innovations introduced with version 2.0.
- You can connect to online drives on FTP or storage services like Amazon S3, OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, Backblaze B2, Box Cloud, etc.
- File management, even compressed in .zip (RAR is not supported)
- Content management on MTP, Android and iOS devices
- Support for encrypted connections
- File tagging
- Customizable keyboard shortcuts
- Using tabs within the main window
- Background operations
- Terminal Emulator
- Support for multiple languages
All this plus the use of Swift as a language make Commander One a fairly fast running application and efficient in all things file management on macOS.
Is Commander One an app for everyone?
With this or any similar application, the typical question most people ask is whether or not it's worth it. The answer is: it depends. If you are a user who solves your daily tasks well with Finder, my answer would be no. Using Commander One can be interesting for anyone, but sometimes it can also add a layer of difficulty that would not be positive in the long run.
If, on the other hand, when you have had to manage the content of multiple folders and drives, Finder has made you desperate or fallen short, then you should give it a try. Because the moment you start to take advantage of all its virtues, you realize how much time you can save. It is something similar to the use of Photomechanic to carry out that first management of the photographs that you will later send to your image editor and later to your catalog or folder where you organize and store them.
Finally, Commander One is a free application . But if you want to get the most out of it and access all the features, you'll have to pay for the Pro version, which costs €32,75.