GNOME Commander 2.0 has arrived after a complete rewrite of the classic file manager for the GNOME desktop. Inspired by the legendary Norton Commander, it is now developed in Rust and uses the GTK4 toolkit. Among its new features are an integrated terminal, a redesigned quick search, improvements to the internal viewer, enhanced accessibility, and optimized support for Wayland. The project is available on GitHub.
Rust and GTK4: the engine of a complete rewrite 🚀
The migration to Rust is not a whim: the language offers memory safety and predictable performance, ideal for a file manager that must handle operations with many files without hesitation. GTK4, for its part, brings more efficient rendering and better integration with Wayland out of the box. The integrated terminal allows you to run commands without leaving the application, while the quick search has been redesigned to filter in real time. The internal viewer now supports more formats and accessibility has been revised for screen readers.
Norton Commander is reborn, but without a floppy drive 💾
Finally, someone has decided that Norton Commander deserved a second life, although this time without the need for floppy disks or invoking DOS. GNOME Commander 2.0 is the same concept of side panels, but now in Rust, as modern standards dictate. The funniest thing is that, after the rewrite, you will probably still use it to move files from one folder to another, as we did in 1995, but with an integrated terminal that nobody asked for. Progress, they say.