Xfm - The X File Manager  

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As of September 2001, the latest release is 1.4.3, featuring some more bug fixes (see ChangeLog). You can now also get the latest moxfm sources from this page, see below.

Download the latest release here:

A screenshot is available here. This program is distributed under the GPL. The binaries have been built on SuSE Linux 7.2 with Xpm and Xaw3d support. Note that the binary package requires that you have recent glibc and X11 libraries on your system. As always, porting should be a piece of cake, so please send me patches and binaries for other systems so that I can make them available here.

Older releases still available: xfm-1.4.2.tar.gz , xfm-1.3.2.tar.gz (you can also find these on ftp.x.org and sunsite.unc.edu ).

Xfm has now certainly become one of the classic X11 file managers. It still has many users all over the net, despite all those nifty new file managers which are nowadays available. I believe that this is due to xfm's simplicity (it is comparatively small and fast and does not require any special GUI toolkit) and the powerful configuration options it offers. Xfm is available in all major Linux distributions and is also the basis of some other popular programs, such as the OffiX file manager, Oliver Mai's moxfm (see below), and my own Motif-based xplore file manager. A review of xfm (1.3) can be found in the #15, July 1995 issue of the Linux Journal. Xfm also won as "Favorite File Manager" in the LJ 1997 Readers' Choice Awards and finished 2nd in 1998.

The original version of this program was written by Simon Marlow (simonm@dcs.glasgow.ac.uk) at the University of Glasgow. Release 1.3 stemmed from my efforts to resolve some bugs in the 1.2 beta version distributed with Linux slackware, and to add XPM support for displaying color icons in the file and application windows. As it came out, I also added a plethora of other features. Other enhancements have been contributed by people on the net. In particular, the shell auto detection feature was added by Robert Vogelgesang (vogelges@rhrk.uni-kl.de) and the magic headers code and numerous file icons by Juan D. Martin (juando@cnm.us.es). Release 1.4, which is mostly the work of Till Straumann (Till.Straumann@tu-berlin.de) at the Technical University of Berlin, fixes some bugs in the 1.3 version and adds a whole bunch of new features, performance enhancements and a much improved standard setup including a spiffy 3d-look icon set.

Moxfm: Back in 1995, Oliver Mai published his very nice Motif port of xfm 1.3.2, called moxfm. Unfortunately, his homepage http://sugra.desy.de/user/mai/moxfm has been offline for ages, and the latest moxfm release does not seem to be available anywhere on the net. I lost my own copy of the moxfm 1.0 sources years ago, so I was very glad when Bob Woodside from the fvwm developer team recently sent me his copy along with some patches. I made some further modifications (most notably, gave moxfm a facelift using the xfm/xplore 3dicons), and now you can get the latest moxfm version here:

Please note that this software is not being maintained any longer. But if you have any patches please send them to me so that I can make them available on this page.

Albert Graef ( ag@muwiinfa.geschichte.uni-mainz.de)
Department of Musicinformatics
Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz
Germany