About

What this is

FinalCommander is a two-panel file manager that works the same way on Linux, macOS and Windows. One program, one set of keys, one configuration file — on every machine you sit at.

That sameness is the point. The orthodox file manager is a forty-year-old idea that every platform reinvented separately: Norton Commander, then FAR on Windows, Midnight Commander on Unix, half a dozen others on each. Each is good; none of them is everywhere, and the keys are never quite the same twice. So the habits learned on one machine stop working on the next.

This rebuilds the idea portably instead of porting one of them. The keys are FAR's by default because that is the most complete of them, with a Midnight Commander profile for the fingers that learned those; the panel is drawn in FAR's own colours; and the parts that were only ever on one platform — the archive handling, the viewer's disassembler, the hex editor — are here on all three.

Where to start

F1 opens the help for where you are: the keys of that screen, each with a line saying what it does, grouped by subject. Right from there is the chapter that explains the screen at length, Esc is the table of contents, and leaving the help puts you back where you were. F9 is the menu bar, which names every dialog and the key that opens it: it lights up without covering anything, and Enter, ↓ or the letter drawn on a title pulls that menu down — Esc rolls it back up and a second one gives the panels back. F10 leaves whatever you are in.

The key bar along the bottom always says what F1 to F12 do right now — in the panel, in the viewer, in the editor — and it follows the modifier you are holding, so holding Shift shows the shifted row.

Nothing is hidden behind a mouse: every action in the program is a named command, every command can be bound to a key, and the "Keys" and "Commands" pages of this help are generated from the keymap the program is actually running, so they cannot drift from the truth.