The venerable Far21 file manager for DOS-based systems was very useful for managing files on an old Windows system. Now there is a Linux version. This means that there is now another file manager for Linux to compete with Midnight Commander.
The screenshot above shows the Far 21 file manager running on Linux. This is very good too.
To begin the installation of this software, firstly install the dependencies.
┌──[jason@192.168.1.3]─[~/Desktop] └──╼ ╼ $ sudo apt-get install gawk m4 libwxgtk3.0-gtk3-dev libpcre2-dev libxerces-c-dev libspdlog-dev libuchardet-dev libssh-dev libssl-dev libsmbclient-dev libnfs-dev libneon27-dev libarchive-dev cmake g++ git |
Then download the source code.
┌──[jason@192.168.1.3]─[~/Desktop] └──╼ ╼ $ git clone https://github.com/elfmz/far2l |
Set up the build environment ready to compile.
cd far2l mkdir _build cd _build |
Then, run this Cmake command to start the build process.
┌──[jason@192.168.1.3]─[~/Desktop] └──╼ ╼ $ cmake -DUSEWX=yes -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release .. |
Then the usual make and then sudo make install commands to compile and install the software.
Then type ‘far21’ to run the file manager. There are shortcuts on the bottom of the screen for the function keys, F1 to F12. So if you have used Midnight Commander before, this will be familiar to you. But this is a very cool piece of history and running it on Linux is very nice.