Marta, file manager for macOS, goes beta

https://marta.yanex.org/marta-goes-beta

by yanex • 8 years ago

217 141 8 years ago

marta.yanex.org

cyrusmg• 8 years ago

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/

darek• 8 years ago

I've been using Nimble Commander for a while now. Snappy, similar to Total Commander on Windows and I love it. The developer recently made it open source and published the code on GitHub here: https://github.com/mikekazakov/nimble-commander

I'm not sure if that's the kind of open source you were looking for, but may be worth checking out.

vbezhenar2• 8 years ago

Wow. When I used macOS, I used this manager a lot and it's awesome. Now Open Source, it's even more awesome.

pbalau• 8 years ago

Total Commander is the best piece of software I ever used! I even bought a license for it, they sent me a cd with an installer and the license and I promptly lost it. At some point i even had tc as a replacement for the Windows shell. These days i dont care that much about where my files are, I have a "work" folder and thats that. My music is on spotify, my videos on netflix/amazon prime/now tv, i dont take that many meaningful pictures anymore and I dont see a reason to care about files anymore. But Total Commander was my life for a very long time, along with piracy :-P

josteink2• 8 years ago

While I think downvoting this comment is unfair, it should be noted that if you care about your OS and tools being open-source, you probably shouldn’t be running OSX in the first place.

I might even suggest running Linux. Oh my :)

ovao• 8 years ago

Limiting the number of entities you need to trust with closed-source software is perfectly sound wisdom, but that number doesn’t need to be zero to be useful.

That’s not to say Marta’s author has any ill intent, because I doubt he or she does.

mrgordon4• 8 years ago

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 Linux as a desktop OS but found the UI and driver situation to be abysmal so it continues to just power our servers)

sscotth• 8 years ago

Or maybe they want to find an open-source file manager to contribute their ideas to?

Digital-Citizen2• 8 years ago

If that's the case (and I take it the absence of a source code repository is how you're reaching your conclusion), that's ironic. The Marta webpage linked to this story includes "Because I want to own what I pay money for." yet one never truly owns proprietary software regardless of price; one can never really tell what it is doing, and users are prohibited from inspecting the program to find out, as well as sharing copies (modified for sure, often verbatim copies too).

yanex11• 8 years ago

Marta author here.

I agree with you that the open source software has higher level of trust than the proprietary one, but I afraid I just can't maintain Marta steadily for a long time if it was open-sourced (and then forever free). And I doubt the community will do that instead of me. In case if you're interested, I expressed my thoughts about this here [1] earlier.

I do promise, though, that Marta will never collect personal data, display ads or do some other bad things. I just don't see any sense in that, and I'd rather have a good reputation.

[1] https://github.com/marta-file-manager/marta-issues/issues/19...

BozeWolf• 8 years ago

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

v_lisivka2• 8 years ago

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

saagarjha4• 8 years ago

What does this app provide that Finder doesn't? I see something about a background operation queue, which Finder does, archive support, which I have a QuickLook plugin for, and gadgets, which I can accomplish with services.

dymk2• 8 years ago

Fully keyboard accessible, which at best Finder.app does badly. IDE-esque "any command" search for operations instead of going through a menu bar.

crispinb7• 8 years ago

Those would have been my top two picks also. I'd add: embedded terminal, and plugins. Services are no alternative - try using one, for example, to show/hide hidden files. You'll have time to make a coffee while it's operating.

saagarjha4• 8 years ago

IDE-esque "any command" search for operations instead of going through a menu bar.

Command+Shift+/, then type your command?

mephitix• 8 years ago

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 the Status bar, etc. I get that it's supposed to be simple but it's surprising to me that such basic things aren't in the starting configuration.

I do love the spacebar preview though :)

eridius• 8 years ago

What does "tokenizing/detokenizing file paths" mean?

"Open in terminal" is actually a built-in Service. It's not enabled by default, but you can go to System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > Services and enable it, and even give it a hotkey.

Finder also has done bulk rename for a few years now.

dylan604• 8 years ago

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.

crispinb7• 8 years ago

On a first look, this looks fantastic. Just what I've been waiting for. Time will tell -- I have thought this about a couple of other file managers, but irritations have always eventually surfaced to drive me back to Finder.

The ST-style command palette alone makes this worth a decent evaluation.

First-run experience was a bit odd - Marta opened up with both panes empty, and all actions unavailable. I had to go to Go->Volumes in each pane and select a volume to show up. That's OK, it's a beta. Seems great so far.

yeasayer• 8 years ago

I don't like that file operations are controlled by F1-F8 keys. This UX is unfriendly to macOS environment. Most users' F-row is in media keys mode by default, so you have to hold Fn otherwise. And I'm not even taking into account the Touch Bar.

crispinb7• 8 years ago

It's not really unfriendly for developers though, who I would expect make up a decent proportion of the intended audience, and who surely all have the 'Use F1, F2 keys as standard function keys' set.

As for the Touch Bar, yes, that's a problem with the standard keybindings (and is also why I'll probably only be a macOS/Marta user for a few months, as I'll never buy a laptop with a fake keyboard).

But settings to the rescue! Cmd-shift-p & 'open default keybindings' reveals that they're all configurable.

derefr• 8 years ago

and who surely all have the 'Use F1, F2 keys as standard function keys' set.

I develop for several different platforms on macOS, and have never felt the need to enable that setting, because I've never encountered any macOS software that required the Fn keys in this particular non-idiomatic way. Even macOS IDEs stay away, tending to map things to complex key-chords instead.

anyfoo• 8 years ago

and who surely all have the 'Use F1, F2 keys as standard function keys' set.

Why? As a heavy emacs and Xcode user at least, I rarely need a function key, and prefer the convenience of the media keys.

marmaduke• 8 years ago

And I'm not even taking into account the Touch Bar.

Yep: the app provides touch bar buttons for many operations

yanex11• 8 years ago

Marta author here.

The default key binding set is a de facto standard for double-pane file managers. I personally used Total Commander for a long time until I switched to Mac, and I really missed a FM with the similar hotkeys.

But I understand now that it's not what all Mac users expect from a file manager. I'll make an option to choose the hotkeys on the first launch [1].

As about the Touch Bar, Marta supports it since 0.1.2.

[1] https://github.com/marta-file-manager/marta-issues/issues/30...

carlesfe• 8 years ago

You can use software like Karabiner to change the default behavior of F keys for specific apps. In my case, function keys behave as F1-F10 in Terminal, Virtualbox, Pycharm and Dosbox, for example.

Not sure about the touch bar though.

aneidon• 8 years ago

I use https://github.com/Pyroh/Fluor to change whether the function keys or the media keys show up based on the application in the foreground.

It works quite well for me.

dymk2• 8 years ago

I would love vim keybindings for this. It's much more intuitive than Finder.app's keybindings, but I hate leaving my home row.

yanex11• 8 years ago

The default bindings are just a de facto standard for double-pane file managers. But all key bindings are configurable, and you can set them to whatever you want in the configuration file. Check the documentation [1] for more information.

[1] https://marta.yanex.org/docs#key-bindings

spython• 8 years ago

Forklift[0] Does a very good job of being a stable and reliable double pane file manager with connectivity such as SFTP, S3, GoogleDrive and nice built in things like batch rename and file transfer queues.

[0] https://binarynights.com/

smaili2• 8 years ago

Didn't see any mention of SCP -- do you happen to know if that is or is planned to be supported?

yanex11• 8 years ago

Please file an issue :) https://github.com/marta-file-manager/marta-issues/issues

usaphp• 8 years ago

I've used ForkLift for a while but then I got a notification that Transmit [1] was updated to version 5 and it's been great so far for me. I like the UI more.

[1] https://panic.com/transmit/

Numberwang2• 8 years ago

The queue thing is something I've always wanted for Windows. Probably for the last 15 years I've wondered why they have't added this and made it a default.

WalterGR• 8 years ago

What? Windows 8 introduced this - and it's better than what's shown in the Marta screenshot.

https://images.techhive.com/images/idge/imported/article/itw...

Numberwang2• 8 years ago

Your screenshot shows exactly what’s wrong. I want a queue.

MikusR• 8 years ago

Total Commander has had a queue for about 17 years.

hs86• 8 years ago

SpeedCommander has this feature: https://www.speedproject.com/

wintercanoe• 8 years ago

Pathfinder is a great file manager for Mac: https://cocoatech.com/

yalestar• 8 years ago

This is really excellent. I used to use Altap Salamander when I was more of a Windows user, and it became one of my most indispensable tools. I've tried most of the Mac commander-style clones (Forklift, Pathfinder, fman, Nimble Commander) and found them slightly off for various reasons. This one really hits the mark for me in terms of functionality, usability/feel, performance, and predictability. And the Sublime-style command palette makes it even better. Excellent job!

bitL• 8 years ago

Try Double Commander.

saagarjha4• 8 years ago

So, I see a plugin API for this, as well as a sample Swift plugin: https://github.com/marta-file-manager/HelloWorldPlugin. How are you making this work? As far as I know, creating plugins in Swift is a bad idea because trying to load two of them with incompatible runtimes (a likely possibility, since Swift doesn't have a stable ABI) would cause bad things to happen.

yanex11• 8 years ago

Well, until Swift introduces ABI compatibility, this is definitely a problem, as both Marta API and a plugin need to be built with the same version of Swift.

Depending on the Swift release roadmap, I'll postpone 1.0 until the release of Swift 5, or make the API ObjC-compatible.

I also have plans for making a "lightweight API" (possibly in Lua). It will support only the subset of features available in the "full API", but if that would be sufficient, nothing prevents it from becoming the "right" way of writing plugins for Marta. (In any case, Swift API won't disappear).

saagarjha4• 8 years ago

both Marta API and a plugin need to be built with the same version of Swift

As far as I’m aware, this isn’t a problem, since your communicating between the two using the Objective-C runtime, which is resilient to the underlying ABI because it essentially overlays its own. The issue arises when you have two plugins with incompatible versions of Swift: in this case, each will load its own standard library, which will lead to conflicts since for any given function in the shared library one of the implementations has to “win out”. This will cause at least one of the plugins to be unable to interface with the standard library correctly.

nodesocket• 8 years ago

Marta looks super nice, but I very hesitant to replace native Finder. I wish Apple would do a complete rewrite of Finder and update it, instead of bolting on these iOS type changes and new applications.

yanex11• 8 years ago

You can use both :) Some of my friends use Finder for simple things like opening the downloaded file, and Marta for advanced file operations.

userbinator2• 8 years ago

Perhaps this is a bit off-topic, but I correctly guessed from the domain name and later, the contents of the page, that [1] the author is Russian, and [2] the file manager resembles the layout of FAR, another file manager of Russian origin and seemingly very popular among them.

In short, what is it with Russians and this type of file manager? It's a very curious association.

gukov• 8 years ago

Norton Commander as well. Russians favour brutal simplicity.

rjzzleep2• 8 years ago

FAR is fascinating. It may look like a Norton Commander, but it's fully integrated in Windows and the extension system goes beyond most Norton Commander clones. It may be a small thing since the API in windows is fairly simple, but what got me is the fact that you double click an item and you get a copy of windows explorers right click + FAR extensions.

But yes, I agree I've asked myself the same question.

pashky• 8 years ago

Would you imagine that instead of browsing records in a shop or even listening to radio all you and your friends have is the same mixtape copied over and over again? Sounds weird, but that's how software distributed from 80s well into mid-00s in Russia.

You didn't get particular products, you got a disk with "all the good bits" according to someone. Somehow Norton Commander ended up in the list at some point, so it instantly became a default and nobody knew anything better. Every DOS computer in 90s Russia booted right into NC, or its Russian clone VC.

gedy• 8 years ago

In general what is it that people love about dual pane file managers? I love alternate UIs but I've never understood this one.

kiaulen• 8 years ago

If you only use a file manager for browsing/opening files, a single window makes sense. But as soon as you want to do a copy/cut and paste, you end up having to browse back and forth between two directories anyway. Dual pane is optimized for that workflow.

vbezhenar2• 8 years ago

I'm Russian and I have no idea! But I can confirm that it's very popular amongst old Russian developers.

mmozeiko• 8 years ago

I pretty much write, compile & run a large chunk of my C, C++, Python and other code in FAR every day.

I use it because I can do so many things in FAR so much faster than any other alternative (or my colleagues). I can view/navigate file/folder structure. View/Edit/Copy/Move/Archive files. And search recursively. Either by file name/extension or in contents. Also run command-line stuff (make, python, git). Inspect output from commands, quickly select text - copy&paste between contents of file, command-line and output of command. And much more. All that with just a few of keyboard shortcuts. No mouse.

And when I'm showing/explaining something to my colleague, I often hear "wait, what just happened?" or "how did you do that so fast?"

// not russian, but using FAR every day (started with Norton Commander, then used Volkov Commander, then Dos Navigator for a long time)

dchest• 8 years ago

Norton Commander (and its clones, such as Volkov Commander, DOS Navigator) was very popular in ex-USSR — almost every computer running DOS (the majority of PCs in ex-USSR back then) had nc running as the main user interface to the PC, and was introduced in most computer education courses in the 90's.

noir_lord• 8 years ago

For me it was Xtree, that was my favorite file manager ever.

abcd_f2• 8 years ago

In fact NC was so ubiquitous that it had jokes about it printed in computer magazines and circulating on the Fido network.

badsectoracula• 8 years ago

I always found it amusing that in Chasm: The Rift (a midlate-90s FPS for DOS made by Action Forms, a Ukrainian game developer), the computer monitors had Norton Commander running:

https://i.imgur.com/63dPueK.png

yogthos• 8 years ago

On a related note, I highly recommend Midnight Commander midnight-commander.org

tuananh• 8 years ago

this is so nice. love the app already!

- feature wise, it's not as good as forklift yet but the performance, ui (personal preference) are much better.

grzm3• 8 years ago

Over a 100 comments from the Show HN a couple of weeks ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13921364

abcd_f2• 8 years ago

That post is from "Mar 21, 2017", i.e. last year :)

grzm3• 8 years ago

Oh, my :) Thanks!

grzm3• 8 years ago

Looks interesting. I'd love to see more screen shots. Is there a gallery somewhere? I poked around the site a bit but didn't find one. Tthough perhaps I just missed it. Been known to happen.)

SyneRyder2• 8 years ago

I agree, more screenshots would be great to get an understanding of the product before trying it. Though I really like the design of the website (and the current screenshot), it gives me a good feeling about the software.

yanex11• 8 years ago

Thanks for the advice! I'll make a gallery that will show more features of Marta.

declanqian• 8 years ago

Just downloaded the beta. Saturday morning. The time I opened the app. I realized I have Emacs dired. I don't need this... Sorry. The UI does look good.

mherrmann6• 8 years ago

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

Ice_cream_suit• 8 years ago

Your fman was the package that surreptitiously ran update daily as root.

I cannot imagine that any security conscious Linux user would willingly use it

* This was a consequence of it's Windows heritage.

mherrmann6• 8 years ago

This was fixed one year ago, within two days of being reported. I was new to Linux at the time and didn't know better [1].

[1] https://fman.io/blog/an-apology-to-linux-users/

SyneRyder2• 8 years ago

Also from Marta's author in that thread:

"The development of Marta started the long before I knew about fman, so it's not any kind of imitation."

"I don't think we are the direct competitors. fman is a completely another project with its own strong and weak points. I tried fman and didn't like it because of numerous reasons, but it's my own opinion."

Two column file manager interfaces have been around for a long time, fman certainly didn't invent it. Marta seems to draw more influence from Midnight Commander / Norton Commander, with the function key reminders at the bottom of the window. The breadcrumbs and tabs in Marta remind me more of Panic's Transmit, and those UI elements aren't in fman. There's elements of the standard Mac finder in there. It is definitely not a clone of fman.

I think that was a really unfair comment, designed to get traffic to a competing product.

mherrmann6• 8 years ago

Also from that thread:

This is eerily similar to fman
I was about to ask if this was some form of re-release

So it's not just me who thinks the similarities are uncanny.

yanex11• 8 years ago

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 was in alpha stages, but why it is a paid product then? Come on, there's still no way to cancel the copy process! And you need to install a third-party plugin to swap panes. I wonder how you made such a small progress since the last year, considering that you work on fman full-time.

mherrmann6• 8 years ago

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

hambos22• 8 years ago

I just tried it and I really liked it. It looks very promising. I applause author's statements about its business model ("The goal for me is to create the best file manager for Mac, not to become rich.").

I have tried everything, from Double Commander, to Forklift,Pathfinder and fman.

I was fman user for about a year (OSX) but it was slow and the quick look (with plugins) was unresponsive and crashed all the time so I cancelled my subscription about one month ago and I was in search for a minimal but powerful dual panel file manager with keyboard functionality.

Thanks for making this, it looks like TotalFinder (which I am a user since the beginning) for power users. Especially the tabs functionality

mherrmann6• 8 years ago

Sorry you didn't have a great experience. I'm working on fman 1.0 with literally 10x better performance.

binaryanomaly2• 8 years ago

Nice! I like it and see potential. Was quite disappointed of all the OSX file managers so far and I think I've tried them all.

After staying for a bit with pathfinder I'm back to finder. While not super decent it still doesn't get into my way too often.

Something more advanced would be welcome though and I would even be willing to pay for it, given it suits my needs. That means though I rather wait for v1.0 because I miss quit a lot of features / ui usability in the current state.

Make it the Sublimetext of file managers and you have a customer.

jaclaz2• 8 years ago

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://www.softpanorama.org/OFM/index.shtml

What started it all is the Norton Commander for DOS.

mherrmann6• 8 years ago

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

jaclaz2• 8 years ago

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.

dctoedt• 8 years ago

What started it all is the Norton Commander for DOS.

I think even it was preceded by the (wonderful) PFM file manager, which has a modern-day descendant in the Linux world.

http://p-f-m.sourceforge.net/

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.archives.msdos....

zhtway• 8 years ago

I haven’t fully tested yet. But I like double pane FM. Thanks for your app. Why you still leave copyright year to 2016 to 2017? Shouldn’t be 2018?

yanex11• 8 years ago

Forgot to update it, my shame! :) Will be updated in 0.5.1.

dvcrn• 8 years ago

I would like to try to use this as default manager for things like `open .` and `reveal in finder` actions. `defaults write -g NSFileViewer -string org.yanex.marta` did a pretty good job with some things but others still don't work.

Is there any way to set it as default?

Marta, file manager for macOS, goes beta

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