Documentation / Help about Ant Commander (Pro) file manager
Local files includes
1 The drive client application needs to be running to synchronize the files with the server
Here are a few example of local files:
Compressed file system are read only file systems. You cannot modify the content of the compressed files and directories.
Ant Commander Pro will handle the compressed files like a directory provided that the file name uses a standard extension. This means that double clicking it or alt + click or Enter key will navigate inside the compressed file.
To execute a compressed file, select the file and click on the Execute button in the status bar.
To open a Zip file with another extension than ‘zip’, select the file, use F9 and ‘Open file as zip file’ action.
The following compression formats are currently supported:
Here are a few examples of url:
Network files are not available in the free version of Ant Commander.
The following network file systems are currently supported:
Use the Navigation -> Go To… action to go to a network directory.
Note that you can bookmark it afterwards.
Rclone is a free software to manager files on cloud storage. It supports more than 70 cloud storage products including Amazon AWS S3, Microsoft Azure Blob and Files Storage, Minio, Google Cloud Storage, Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, Blackblaze B2, Cloudflare R2, DigitalOcean Spaces and iCLoud Drive.
You will first need to install Rclone on your computer. Rclone is available for Windows, MacOS and Linux.
If Rclone is not defined in the PATH environment variable, provide in the File system settings the path to the executable.
When Rclone create a remote config, using rclone config. Once the config create, you can access it using rclone://remote-name/path. For example: rclone://my-gdrive/backups/data.zip
Ant Commander Pro handles no authentication credentials. It relies entirely on the environment having a valid rclone.conf.
To access a rclone file system, use Navigation -> File Systems -> Go to Rclone, select the remote and the path. The path can be empty for the root and should not start with /. Click on the + button to add or manage remotes.
rclone listremotes can be used to list the remote names already configured.
Work has been done in Ant Commander Pro to also have access to cloud file systems without using Rclone. This work is still experimental and is not included in Ant Commander Pro due to the important files size for the libraries, the beta state of the code and lack of possibility to test it in a real enterprise environment.
If you are interested to use any of these file systems at your company, contact info@japplis.com to apply for the beta testing phase.
The following cloud file systems are in experimental phases and not available by default:
The S3 file system is not only used at Amazon AWS but also at companies like Backblaze, Wasabi, Exoscale, OVH Cloud, IBM Cloud storage and more.
For Amazon S3, use F9 -> Go to S3
Another way is using Go to S3 provider
For more details, see Amazon credentials documentation
S3 urls are s3://. Note that s3a:// and s3n:// may be supported (not tested)
For Microsoft Azure Storage, use F9 -> Go to Azure
Azure url is azure:// or azfs://
For Dropbox, use F9 -> Go to Dropbox
You will need a OAuth token, see Dropbox documentation for more details.
Dropbox url is dropbox://
For Google Storage, use F9 -> Go to Google Storage
You can provide either a Service account key file or a storage key
Google Storage url is gs://
For Google Drive, use F9 -> Go to Google Drive
You will need a crednetials file, see Google documentation on how to get it.
You will other need a token. Ant Commander Pro will open the browser for you to authenticate and save the token in the designated token directory.
Google Drive url is googledrive://
Lst files are text files containing list of files with size and last modified date.
Use F9 -> Store directory files in text to create a lst file of a directory.
To open it, just double click on the created .lst file.
This file system is read only and cannot view file content unless the listed directory is still accessible.
It is possible to match a .lst file with a directory with F9 -> Match Lst with Directory, for example to quickly search files and still be able to open files.
The github file system allows to browse a remote github repository in Ant Commander Pro like a file system.
Use F9 -> Go to GitHub action to open this file system
I highly advise in creating an API Token key to be able to do more requests to the GitHub API.
The URL should look like https://github.com/organization/project-name/tree/branch-name
The GitHub file system is read-only.
The cluster file system allow to view multiple similar directories as one.
Use the Go to cluster action to enter the list of directories.
If a file is not in all directories, the file name will look more transparent.
The size and date of the last modified file is used in the directory table panel.
Clicking on a file will show the files (with the same name) in the different directories. The tooltip will show you the absolute path of the file. Note that technically this is another file system.
The bookmark file system will show the bookmark like if it was a directory. Clicking on a bookmark (file or directory) will open the file or directory.
Use Navigation -> Go To… -> Drives drop down to go to a bookmark file system.
The bookmark file file system is a file system that takes a text file (.bookmarks extension) as input and create a file system based on the bookmarks in text file.
Like for Lst or compressed file, just double click on the .bookmarks text file to open the file system.
You can manipulate the bookmarks in this file system by copying files, moving files, renaming files, creating folders.
This file system is in beta stage, so you may experience more bugs. In this case, you can always edit the .bookmarks file using a text editor.
Ram will store files and directories in the RAM of the computer.
Note that as soon as you close the application, all files and directories in this file system will be permanently deleted.
File locations are stored with URLs. More info at the Commons VFS website