A file manager or file browser is a computer program that provides a user interface to manage files and folders. The most common operations performed on files or groups of files include creating, opening (e.g. viewing, playing, editing or printing), renaming, moving or copying, deleting and searching for files, as well as modifying file attributes, properties and file permissions. Folders and files may be displayed in a hierarchical tree based on their directory structure. Some file managers contain features inspired by web browsers, including forward and back navigational buttons.
Some file managers provide network connectivity via protocols, such as FTP, HTTP, NFS, SMB or WebDAV. This is achieved by allowing the user to browse for a file server (connecting and accessing the server's file system like a local file system) or by providing its own full client implementations for file server protocols
Directory editors
A term that predates the usage of file manager is directory editor. An early directory editor, DIRED, was developed circa 1974 at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory by Stan Kugell.[1][2]
A directory editor was written for EXEC 8 at the University of Maryland, and was available to other users at that time. The term was used by other developers, including Jay Lepreau, who wrote the dired program in 1980,[3] which ran on BSD. This was in turn inspired by an older program with the same name running on TOPS-20. Dired inspired other programs, including dired, the editor script (for emacs and similar editors), and ded. [4]
File-list file manager
File-list file managers are lesser known and older than orthodox file managers.
One such file manager is flist, which was introduced sometime before 1980 on the Conversational Monitor System.[5][6][7] This is a variant of fulist, which originated before late 1978, according to comments by its author, Theo Alkema.[8]
The flist program provided a list of files in the user's minidisk,[9] and allowed sorting by any file attribute. The file attributes could be passed to scripts or function-key definitions, making it simple to use flist as part of CMS EXEC, EXEC 2 or XEDIT scripts.
This program ran only on IBM VM/SP CMS, but was the inspiration for other programs, including filelist[10][11][12] (a script run via the Xedit editor), and programs running on other operating systems, including a program also called flist, which ran on OpenVMS,[13] and fulist (from the name of the corresponding internal IBM program),[14] which runs on Unix.[15]
Orthodox file managers
Midnight Commander, an orthodox file manager with a text-based user interface
Orthodox file managers (sometimes abbreviated to "OFM") or command-based file managers are text-menu based file managers, that commonly have three windows (two panels and one command line window). Orthodox file managers are one of the longest running families of file managers, preceding graphical user interface-based types. Developers create applications that duplicate and extend the manager that was introduced by PathMinder and John Socha's famous Norton Commander for DOS.[citation needed] The concept dates to the mid-1980s—PathMinder was released in 1984, and Norton Commander version 1.0 was released in 1986. Despite the age of this concept, file managers based on Norton Commander are actively developed, and dozens of implementations exist for DOS, Unix, and Microsoft Windows. Nikolai Bezroukov publishes his own set of criteria for an OFM standard (version 1.2 dated June 1997