Good and Free Utility Software

(Feb 12, 2008)

(references
Free Commander: http://www.freecommander.com/
FileAnt: http://www.fileant.com/
Capivara: http://capivara.sourceforge.net/

There are some software I expect to use often in the near future. First, I need a better file manager able to view Thai file names. Second, I need a software to synchronize my local folder with an FTP server.

For the file manger, there are two good candidates that catch my attention. The first one is 'FileAnt' and the second is 'Free Commander'. I have used FileAnt for a while and I like it. It has a unique feature--double click to go up one level. In details, if we double click on an empty space of a folder, we will go out of the current folder. This is very handy and make navigation fast. FileAnt, however, cannot view Thai file names.

So, I looked for another candidate and end up with Free Commander (http://www.freecommander.com/). Its user interface looks good and can view Thai file names. It has a shortcut to a favorite folder. If we set up favorite folders, ctrl-shift+1 (or 2, 3, 4, ..) will take us to a favorite folder. In fact, the shortcut can be set to a pair of folders. Namely, if we enter a shortcut, it will change an active panel to a folder and an inactive one to another folder we set. This should be very convenient when we need to transfer files between two specific folders often to back up data, for example.

For file synchronization, I chose Capivara (http://capivara.sourceforge.net/) since it has all features I need. These features are SFTP support and file change detection (the second is a must for file synchronizer). Its user interface is very intuitive too. With Capivara, we can have files at three places: home, office, and central server. We can choose to work at an office and just synchronize to the server when we are done. Then, we can retrieve updated files at home from the server to continue our work and synchronize again when we finish. This scenario will make every thing handy and safe (unless we force overwriting a newer files carelessly).