Far Manager is a free, open-source file and archive manager for Windows. Its text-mode interface combines two file panels with a command line, a file viewer and a text editor. You can select files in a directory, copy them elsewhere, inspect their contents or pass their names to a command while keeping the directory listings available.
Far Manager’s two file panels
Each panel can display a different folder, so a source directory and a destination can remain on screen together. Tab changes the active panel. File listings can show compact columns of names or more detail, including sizes, dates and attributes. Sorting by extension, size or modification time changes how those entries are grouped and ordered; color highlighting adds another way to distinguish files.
Selection determines the scope of an operation. Far Manager can mark individual entries, select names matching a wildcard mask, or select files with the same extension as the current file. An operation acts on that selection, or on the item under the cursor when nothing is selected. One panel can also become a quick view of the item highlighted in the other, displaying file contents or folder statistics.
Copy controls
The copy and move dialogs accept destination paths and control what happens when a file of the same name already exists. You can ask for a decision, replace the target, skip it, rename the incoming file or copy only files with a newer modification time.
Far Manager also accepts several destinations when its multiple-destination option is enabled. Filters can restrict which files a copy operation processes. On NTFS, the access-rights setting determines whether new objects use the operating system’s default behavior, retain source permissions or inherit permissions from the destination’s parent folder.
File search
Search combines filename masks with optional content criteria. A query can look for text, whole words or a sequence of hexadecimal bytes, with encoding controls for text stored in different code pages. The search scope can cover the current directory, selected folders or drives.
Results remain usable while the search continues. You can open a matching file in the viewer or editor, jump to its directory, or collect the results in a temporary panel. Archive searching is available for recognized formats, although it does not search inside nested archives.
File viewer
The internal viewer offers text, hexadecimal and dump views. Text view interprets the file using the selected encoding and can wrap long lines. Hexadecimal view pairs byte values with offsets and character representations, while dump view displays data without treating line breaks as text-line boundaries.
Content search, position navigation and bookmarks help move through a file. The viewer can switch directly to the editor when inspection leads to a text change, and it can move between files from the active panel.
Text editing
Far Manager’s editor opens existing text files and creates new ones. It supports ordinary text selections and vertical blocks, along with undo, redo, search and replacement. Regular-expression searches process each line separately, which matters for patterns that would otherwise need to span line breaks.
Saving under another name also exposes encoding and line-ending choices. You can retain the existing line breaks or choose Windows, Unix or classic Mac conventions. Supported Unicode encodings include an option to add a byte-order mark, giving control over how the resulting text file is identified by other applications.
Archives and plugin file systems
Archive handling extends the panel model: files inside an archive appear in a folder-like listing, and file operations are passed to the archive component. Plugins also provide such functions as FTP access, network browsing and temporary panels. These components can present their own file systems through the same interface used for local directories.
The available operations depend on the component. A plugin must support an action before Far Manager can copy, move, edit or search its entries.
Command line and user menus
The command line can insert a filename or full path from either panel, linking directory navigation with external commands. Frequently used commands can instead be placed in a user menu with hotkeys, submenus and command sequences.
A local menu can belong to a particular folder, while a main menu supplies commands elsewhere.
