Today I intended to write a comparison of a few Gnome filemanagers I downloaded and tested this morning, but it's late and going to bed is starting to look like an attractive option.

And tomorrow I'll go to San Siro (or as it's called now stadio Meazza) to see Inter's debut match for this season, so I suspect I won't feel like writing the article either.

So a short entry is in order. Trying to find a speedier and hopefully more usable alternative to Nautilus, I downloaded three file managers:

• Velocity
• Gnome File Manager
• Endeavour Mark II

Velocity looks promising though it makes quite a mess if you let it manage your desktop, or change a folder icon. It also lacks basic things like a detailed view of files, with dates sizes etc (or if it's there, I could not find it easily enough). No screenshot here, since it basically looks like Nautilus with a working directory tree in the sidebar.

The Gnome File Manager is a very quick, basic Norton Commander look-a- like. It has what you expect from a similar program. Not having much, it does not miss much, apart from context menus to perform basic actions with the mouse instead of hitting the F-keys, a status bar displaying the available F-keys commands like its ancestor has, and drag and drop. No screenshot here either, since it's look is very plain and similar to most of its relatives.

Endeavour is the best of the three. It's a feature-rich file manager, with special modes for archives and images, and tools to search for files and mount/unmount disks. I managed to lock it a few times with the open with menu entry for file items, and could not manage to make its archives mode work too well, but on the whole it's a beautiful and feature-rich application and I suspect that if you spend some time customizing it, it may work well.

In the end I did not use any of the three file managers, and did what I had to do from the shell, as usual. =)