Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Marta, file manager for macOS, goes beta

marta.yanex.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 145 posts

Re: Marta, file manager for macOS, goes beta

#111

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

userbinator wrote: post #78
tesseract wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The canonical 80s/90s Mac OS answer would be, just open 2 (or 3 or 4 or n) file browser windows next to each other. Arguably the workflow of moving/copying stuff between windows was a key motivator for the creation of windowing systems in the first place. But today that multi-window workflow, while of course still possible, somehow feels less salient... the DOS/MDI-era Windows UI norm of "one window ≈ one application…

I'm mainly a Windows user and I regularly have a dozen or more explorer windows open, all showing directories of interest to my current work. From that perspective, using a file manager with only two effective "windows" feels more constraining.

Have you tried Q-Dir? I installed it on my work PC using Chocolatey. I've found a couple instances of Q-Dir superior to a bunch of Windows Explorer windows for most of the things I do on a Windows PC.

Re: Marta, file manager for macOS, goes beta

#112

Post by mherrmann »

yanex wrote: post #96
mherrmann wrote: post #84

Marta was inspired by (my) https://fman.io [1]. Marta's author criticises that fman doesn't feel native enough because it is also available for Windows and Linux. (It's based on PyQt.) What you get in return however are a more vibrant community and plugin ecosystem in Python. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13921631

Marta is not inspired by fman. The Action panel (I think it's called a Command palette in fman) is likely to be the only common thing between our products – and we both took it from Sublime Text. But it's not really important. The "doesn't feel native" is not the main problem for me. I use a number of non-native apps (such as IJ IDEA) – and I'm okay with it. fman is a just slow app without features. It was ok if it w…

You're focused on "features". Given your limited time, that makes sense. But a successful project requires more. I have been working on many things that are less visible (besides the fact that I'm supporting three times as many platforms). This affects things like the number of plugins contributed by users (fman has 10x those of Marta). Or the activity on the issue tracker (compare fman's [1] with Marta's [2], where - except for the past 24 hours - virtually all issues are by you). You're right that fman can improve in terms of features and speed. It will. But those things are just the tip of the iceberg.

[1]: https://github.com/fman-users/fman/issues

[2]: https://github.com/marta-file-manager/marta-issues/issues

Re: Marta, file manager for macOS, goes beta

#113

Post by jpz »

dylan604 wrote: post #29
mephitix wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you've ever used Total Commander or even Windows 7+ native file explorer it's very hard to go back to or use Finder. Keyboard shortcuts, tokenizing/detokenizing file paths, opening in terminal, searching within files, search for duplicate files, bulk rename, plugins, and more. Whenever I have a new Mac I spend a couple minutes customizing Finder: adding things like the Path button, showing the Path bar, showing th…

> I do love the spacebar preview though :) This. It's the biggest pain point I have with using Windows Explorer. As a Mac user, it's pure muscle memory to select a file and hit the space to look at it. Once I'm on Windows, I feel the whole computer is broken because of this one missing feature.

wow - I'm sitting here with my dual screen iMac setup, never knew about the spacebar! Thanks! lol :)

Re: Marta, file manager for macOS, goes beta

#114

Post by jaclaz »

mherrmann wrote: post #108
jaclaz wrote: post #106

>Marta is a dual-pane file manager. Most of the time you work with two directory panes placed side-by-side. This allows you to do the basic file operations such as copying or moving files in a fast and efficient way, because you can see both source and target directories, and you can copy or move files directly, without copy-pasting it. Just in case, it could be categorized as a OFM (Orthodox File Manager): http://ww…

If you're interested in a little history: https://fman.io/blog/dual-pane-file-manager-history/

>If you're interested in a little history: https://fman.io/blog/dual-pane-file-manager-history/

Thank you, though I knew most of those info as - unfortunately - I was there, in the sense that I was in my twenties when NC came out, I practically started my computing experience at work using NC and I couldn't imagine doing some tasks without a dual pane filemanager, and when the NC was killed by Symantec I mourned the loss (and quickly found some decent alternatives, the one with the most "NC feeling" being IMHO DN - Dos Navigator and later NDN - Necoromancer's Dos Navigator).

As a side note, what not everyone knows/noticed, 7-zip it is also a (almost orthodox) dual pane file manager, very handy to manage, besides files residing on mounted filesystems also those inside archives (obviously) and those inside disk/disc/drive images, such as .iso, .img and similar.

Re: Marta, file manager for macOS, goes beta

#116

Post by solarkraft »

microtonal wrote: post #110
ReverseCold wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux is actually good now for desktop use. I install it (= Fedora or Antergos w/ GNOME) on everything now and it just works(tm). Not a single thing has been broken across two modern PCs and a laptop.

Linux is actually good now for desktop use. I install it (= Fedora or Antergos w/ GNOME) on everything now and it just works(tm). If I got a dollar every time I heard this... I have a Linux machine at home, but GNOME still crashes 50% of the time when I switch the screen off/on. If it switches on without crashing, many applications are LoDPI until I restart them. The machine doesn't always come back properly from sle…

While Windows keeps crashing and is glitchy, laggy, likes to crash and is generally disgusting and mac OS (Hackintosh) is unreliable and with a not very customizable UI, Elementary OS works very well on the Xiaomi Mi Notekook Air 13 (what a name).

If something breaks I can fix it. I can easily schedule jobs (tried it on Windows, fucking night mare), define my own trackpad gestures, lower the screen brightness to an acceptable level ...

Linux, with all of its flaws, is by far the least frustrating OS, imo.

... Unless you need some Apps.

Re: Marta, file manager for macOS, goes beta

#117

Post by solarkraft »

azinman2 wrote: post #72
ReverseCold wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux is actually good now for desktop use. I install it (= Fedora or Antergos w/ GNOME) on everything now and it just works(tm). Not a single thing has been broken across two modern PCs and a laptop.

Question is “good for what?” It simply doesn’t have the polish, or flexibility that I’d need to effectively stay on it for long. I always end up spending longggg times customizing things only to feel little integration, little support, and a lack of decent third party software. Sketch is Mac only. Spotify barely has a Linux client. Certainly no photoshop, medocire native email clients, zero IM that integrate with any…

Spotify on Linux == Spotify on Mac == Spotify on Windows == Spotify on the web.

It's an electron app.

Re: Marta, file manager for macOS, goes beta

#119

Post by v_lisivka »

BozeWolf wrote: post #33
cyrusmg wrote: post #2

The file manager seems to be closed-source[1], does anyone know of any good open-source alternatives ? [1] https://github.com/marta-file-manager/

I still use midnight commander every now and then. It is terminal based though. It is open source, feature packed and works cross platform.

I also use mc everyday, because it gives huge performance boost when working in shell, but it's time for face lift.

Re: Marta, file manager for macOS, goes beta

#120

Post by newscracker »

ReverseCold wrote: post #28
mrgordon wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This all or nothing mentality doesn't often end up being useful in practice. For example, try doing some deep learning on Linux with CUDA without installing closed source NVIDIA drivers. The important detail is who provided the software and in this case most people are going to trust Apple or NVIDIA significantly more than a small third-party software developer they've never heard of. (FWIW many of us tried running L…

Linux is actually good now for desktop use. I install it (= Fedora or Antergos w/ GNOME) on everything now and it just works(tm). Not a single thing has been broken across two modern PCs and a laptop.

> Linux is actually good now for desktop use.

Depends on what's required. I installed Linux (Ubuntu and Xubuntu) on an old Mac, and found it extremely hard to get file sharing (with SMB shares) done. I also gave up on installing a VNC server. For both these, I was looking for GUI based options. On the Mac (for longer than a decade), one just goes to Apple menu->System Preferences->Sharing and then turn on screen sharing, file sharing, etc., very easily.

I also had to configure certain other things using the shell. I personally didn't experience Linux being adequate for desktop use.

Post reply on HN