Mac offers Finder as the default file manager that allows you to manage files on your Mac device. For a standard file management need, Finder is good enough. Everyone loves the interface of Finder with its turquoise folder icon. However, Finder is not good enough for a more complex file management. You need another alternative to handle a complex file management.
Commander One is one of the alternatives to Finder you can install on your Mac. It is particularly a good option if you have a bunch of files on the cloud storage services to manage as Commander One comes with lots of cloud integrations.
What is Commander One?
Commander One is file manager for Mac, just like Finder. You can use it to do such things as creating a new folder, deleting files, copying files and so on. The difference is that Commander One offers more features than Finder. One of the highlight features offered by Commander One is a dual-panel interface which allows you to handle more tasks regarding file management in a single window. Commander One itself is a freemium app, meaning that you can use it for free.
The premium version of Commander One offers a bunch of integrations, including cloud storage integrations which will be handy if you are an active user of a cloud storage service. Commander One itself was written in Swift. Speaking of interface, Commander One is not much different to Finder. It also comes with a turquoise folder icon.
Features
Commander One can be a great Finder alternative since it offers more features than the default file manager of Mac. As mentioned, one of the highlight features of Commander One is a dual-panel interface which allows you to perform more tasks in a single window. But, it’s just a beginning. You can also open as many tabs as you want on each panel. Furthermore, Commander One also offers three different view modes.
When copying files to another folder, you sometimes want to rename them with different names. With Commander One, you don’t have to wait until the copying process is done to do so. Commander allows you to rename files during copy and move operations.
When working with Finder on Mac, you can use shortcuts to save time and make you look like a pro. For instance, you can use Command+C to copy files and Command+V to paste them. Commander One also offers the same feature, even better since you are allowed to set you own shortcuts for certain operations. Search is another vital enough feature of a file manager. The search feature of Commander One is one step above Finder. It allows you to search for files and folder even if the files/folders are compressed. You can use Regular Expressions for more precise search and make it case sensitive.
If you get bored with the current look of Commander One, you can also change it since Commander One also comes with customizable fonts & colors. Commander One is also capable of handling ZIP files. You can extract as well as create a ZIP file without installing additional app. Furthermore, Commander One also allows you to show hidden files and preview multiple types of files incl. binary and hex.
Premium features
All of the features covered above are available on both free version and premium version of Commander One. To get the most out of Commander One, you might want to upgrade to the premium version which costs $29.99 per Mac device. There are a lot of other features you will get if you upgrade to premium.
You can connect to remote servers via FTP protocol thanks to its built-in FTP client. If you have a bunch of files on cloud storage services — like Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive — you can also manage them in a professional dual-panel interface.
Premium version also supports more archive file formats. In addition to ZIP, you can also work with RAR, TarGz and TarGz files. Be it extracting or creating a new ones. Furthermore, premium version also allows you to mount Android and iPhone devices in case you want to manage your files on your smartphone from Mac.
Conclusion
Working with a bunch of files with the aim to manage them can be frustrating if the file manager you use has no decent features. For instance, there is a file manager — like Windows File Explorer — that doesn’t support multiple tabs. A file manager with multiple tabs support is great to manage a bunch of files since you don’t need to take switch to another windows when working. Commander One is one of file managers for Mac that offers this sort of feature. You can even split its window into two panels with each panel can open lots of tabs. Commander also offers handy features like FTP client, cloud storage integrations and built-in archive manager. It can be a great alternative to Finder.