PCManFM is an extremly fast, lightweight, yet feature-rich file manager with tabbed browsing.

PCMan File Manager (PCManFM) is a file manager application developed by Hong Jen Yee from Taiwan which is meant to be a replacement for Nautilus, Konqueror and Thunar.

Released under the GNU General Public License, PCManFM is free software. PCManFM is the standard file manager in LXDE, which is also developed by the same author in conjunction with other developers.

PCManFM is intended to follow the specifications given by Freedesktop.org for in PCManFM's features include:
    Full gvfs support with seamless access to remote filesystems (Able to handle sftp://, webdav://, smb://, ...etc when related backends of gvfs are installed.)
    Thumbnails for pictures (default only for local pictures) with optional EXIF support
    Desktop management - shows wallpaper and desktop icons, with possibility to have different wallpapers on each desktop
    Bookmarks - saved places. You can see them in the left panel of PCManFM. Visible from other Gtk+ applications.
    Multilingual (translated in several languages)
    Can be started in one second on normal machine
    Tabbed windows (similar to Firefox tabs)
    Volume management (mount/unmount/eject, requires gvfs) with optional automounting
    Drag & Drop support
    Files can be dragged among tabs
    File association support (e.g. default application to open)
    Provides icon view, compact view, detailed list view and thumbnail view.
    Standard compliant (follows the FreeDesktop.org guidelines)
    Clean and user-friendly interface (GTK+ 2)
    Trash can support
Build Requirement:
The packages listed here are their names in Debian and Ubuntu. In other distributions, you should be able to find the same set of packages, but in slightly different naming convention. For example, *-dev listed here may be named *-devel in Fedora, Mandriva, ..etc.
    automake >= 1.9
    libgtk2.0-dev >= 2.6
    libglib2.0-dev >= 2.6 (2.10+ is highly recommended)
    libgamin-dev or libfam-dev (libgamin is better)
    libstartup-notification0-dev
    libhal-dev (Required when --enable-hal configure option is used)
    libdbus-1-dev (Required when --enable-hal configure option is used)
    libhal-storage-dev (Required when --enable-hal configure option is used)
Get the Source Code:
    Project Page:
         http://sourceforge.net/projects/pcmanfm/

    Subversion Repository (Latest):
        This project's SourceForge.net Subversion repository can be checked out through SVN with the following instruction set:
        svn co https://pcmanfm.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/pcmanfm/trunk pcmanfm
    Browse the source code online:
        http://svn.sourceforge.net/pcmanfm
    Tarball
        http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=156956
Compile the Source Code:
extract the tarball you downloaded, and go to the extracted directory in terminal.
Type following commands in terminal:

    ./configure
    make
    sudo make install

Here are many screeshots with brief descriptions demostrating the main features of PCManFM.
Icon view mode + shorcut pane with 4 tabs opened

List view mode + dir tree pane with 3 tabs opened.

Basic desktop icon support (All files in ~/Desktop are showed on your desktop)
This is turned off by default, you can enable this feature in the preference dialog.

User-friendly popup menu for selected files

 

Choose custom applications for specified file type

Built-in file compressing GUI front-end calling external programs (tar, zip)

Open current folder as root or open it in the terminal emulator you like in a convinient way.

Preference dialog

When you run PCMan FM with root access either deliberately or accidentally, it will show a warning bar, so you won't do harm to your system unwittingly.  This warning cannot be turned off.  If you see this bar frequently, and find it annoying, you'd better change your habit.  It's unwise to run a file manager with root access too often unless you are in MS Windows, where many people use Administrator all the time.

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