I believe my quest for the perfect GUI file manager in Linux has been fulfilled after I stumbled across a file manager named Thunar while playing with XFCE on my Ubuntu laptop. My most missed feature from browsing Windows file systems has been the “List” view. It’s is, very simply, columns of file names, with nothing else. The main file browsers of Gnome and KDE, Nautlius and Konqueror, suprisingly cannot do this, and while they come close with a lot of customization, they do not mimic Windows Explorer perfectly. Nautilus like to wrap really long file name, or only do one file per line, and Konqueror likes to add “…” to the end of long filenames, which makes it less than useful.

Thunar does both these things, and does this very quickly. Here’s a pic of what I’m so excited about (right click and hit “view image” to see the full sized pic):