We’ve written about plenty of Electron apps, from music players to e-mail clients, code editors and chat tools — but the following tool the first Electron file manager we’ve come across!
It’s called JumpFM and it’s described as a ‘minimalistic dual pane file manager for Linux’. The developer of the app cites fman, a cross-platform Qt file manager, and Exa, a terminal tool that lets you add bling to the ls command, as key main influences.
Pitched as “highly configurable and extendible”, JumpFM has a number of neat features and integrations, the bulk of which you can enable/disable and configure so suit your own needs.
JumpFM is a keyboard driven app. To get the best experience I recommend getting familiar with its keyboard shortcuts nice and early.
Most are obvious: you can toggle hidden files on/off by pressing ‘h‘, switch between panes using ‘tab‘, and navigate in and out of folders using keyboard arrow keys, backspace, and ‘enter’.
Additionally:
Jumping (‘j’) lets you quickly ‘jump’ to your favorites folders without needing to click out of the folder you’re in. Directories don’t need to be bookmarked as favourites either as the app ‘learns’ which folder you frequently visit
Filtering (‘f‘) is a simple search feature that helps find whatever files you are looking for by typing in part of its file name.
Flat mode (‘r‘) toggles the standard hierarchal directory-based view and a flat, no folder view which lists all files inside the directory and its sub-directories.
Instant Gist (ctrl + g) lets you quickly create a new gist from a selected file in the file manager.
The file manager can be extended by installing extra plugins. These plugins range from showing the time and current weather conditions in the JumpFM status bar, to adding integral file manager features like archive unzipping.
For details on all of the features of JumpFM, additional plugins, and to see full list of keyboard shortcuts do head over to the JumpFM website.
A Few Minor Issues
By default JumpFM will only list the first 100 files and/or folders in a directory. This wouldn’t be too much of an issue if there was a way to ‘page’ on to the rest of the results. But there isn’t. This can be very frustrating when zipping around folders with lots of files, especially ones you want to filter through.
You can raise the files limit in the settings file, though as this could impact on performance I’d advise against setting it to a ridiculously high number.
Another caveat we ought to mention will require a big, bold, alert box so that you don’t gloss over it:
Download JumpFM, an Electron File Manager
As an open source project you can get involved in the development of JumpFM, or extend functionality using its plug-in system.
You can download the latest JumpFM AppImage (which will work on most modern Linux distributions) from the Github project page below: