Comments on: How to Replace Nautilus with PCMan File Manager in Ubuntu

By: Jerry Amos

Jerry Amos — Sat, 09 Oct 2010 00:02:06 +0000

On pcmanfm on Ubuntu, double click on an icon which is a shell script does not execute it.

On pcman on Debian, just right click on the shell script and it executes.

I can’t find out how to execute anything with pcmanfm on Ubuntu.

If pcmanfm cannot do that, then I’m for nautilus.

By: Donald Duckegg

Donald Duckegg — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 06:10:59 +0000

This doesnt seem to apply to Lucid 10.04 - because none of these files are in this directory!

By: Poisonous

Poisonous — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 21:11:31 +0000

Every time a package upgrade triggers on, I will have to redo this. Great, great, ingenious solution.

By: suolakurkku

suolakurkku — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 03:47:38 +0000

Nevermind that, I just had and extra “=” in the file I didn’t notice *slams his head to the desk*

By: suolakurkku

suolakurkku — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 03:44:46 +0000

I didn’t see the files on either of the filemanagers, so I used the terminal to access them, replaced the lines as the tutorial prompted, but when I click something (Places > Home Folder for instance), all I get is an errormessage ; Could not open location ‘file:///home/suolakurkku’ Failed to execute child process “=pcmanfm” (No such file or directory)

Any ideas?

By: David

David — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 09:52:34 +0000

I was looking for a fast GUI file manager for occasional use over VNC, and didn’t want to install a huge desktop environment on this system. pcmanfm is perfect.

By: Brett

Brett — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 15:27:29 +0000

The day it has out-of-the-box support for sftp, ftp, etc. is the day I switch to it.

By: sdowney717

sdowney717 — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 19:32:15 +0000

is there any way the “save as” dialog box can be sped up? takes 30 seconds to open for me. I assume it is still using nautilus??

By: sdowney717

sdowney717 — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 19:30:34 +0000

OK, I got it working. Weirdly, there are supposed to be 2 files named this and you need to put in that

For nautilus-computer.desktop: Exec=pcmanfm /

and

For nautilus-folder-handler.desktop: Exec=pcmanfm %U

But for some reason on my system, there was a “~” at the end of the files and any changes
I made were ignored. The only way I could rename them was to use nautilus as a super user. PCMan could not do it, kept reverting to “open folder” and “computer”

By: sdowney717

sdowney717 — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 18:19:49 +0000

tried it but did not work on Jaunty.
nautilus still opens whether the 2 files are modified or even deleted

By: junaidi

junaidi — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 08:12:40 +0000

I’ve followed all the steps given to change file manager to use pcman, but every time I click on places submenu, it launch “Find Files” instead of pcman, is there anything I can do to fix the problem?

By: Skillachi

Skillachi — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 14:17:08 +0000

Great tip. I have a question though. Instead of PCman I want to change my file manager from nautilus to the kde4 dolphin… Can you post a write up on how to do that too?

By: blink4blog

blink4blog — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 07:39:27 +0000

Really nice tip, now me using PCMan file manager instead of resources hungry Nautilus. The only draw back is cannot move the icons on the desktop and have to configure wallpaper using PCMan instead of System > Preference > Appearance

By: libre fan

libre fan — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 09:44:46 +0000

Thanks for this page. PCMan File Manager is light and nice and I followed your instructions. Yet it crashes each time I want to browse an image dir. Also if I mount an external devicxe nautilus takes precedence and I can’t copy from a Nautilus window to a PCMan File Manager window.

Finally bookmarks don’t seem to remain in the tree -- Brett I can see a tree view all right (just make it appear).

Rox-filer may not be as integrated with Gnome but it rocks.

By: Brett

Brett — Fri, 23 May 2008 00:26:20 +0000

I still think its missing a tree view… Thats something I’d like to see in Nautilus.

By: gsiliceo

gsiliceo — Wed, 21 May 2008 18:00:04 +0000

Thats nice but i wrote additional steps in ubuntu forums to get a complete replace.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=692238

Look for the second post.

By: barpanel

barpanel — Wed, 21 May 2008 05:19:19 +0000

On a related note, I can also recommend a related article: How to replace your GNOME panel with BarPanel. BarPanel is an alternative to gnome panel just as pcmanfm is for the nautilus file manager.

By: Wandering

Wandering — Tue, 20 May 2008 21:26:17 +0000

I can’t believe that you will save the time invested in this post in the next 20 years of using this software. I just can’t see the point. Blessings on all who use it.

By: Luptinpitman

Luptinpitman — Tue, 20 May 2008 19:19:27 +0000

Weird.

I was able to see them from the terminal. Made backups, made changes, save/close, money.

Thanks for the howto!

By: Luptinpitman

Luptinpitman — Tue, 20 May 2008 18:52:12 +0000

Am I crazy? I can’t find the two files specified.

/usr/share/applications/nautilus-computer.desktop
/usr/share/applications/nautilus-folder-handler.desktop

I navigate to /usr/share/applications and see neither.

I run a search on the system for both *.desktop files and they are found in the path /usr/share/applications but they aren’t actually there when I browse via PCMAN or Nautilus.

Kind of freaking me out

I’ve tried Ctrl+H to see if they are hidden, which they are not. Any ideas?