Nimble Commander is intended for managing files and folders. In this regard, it is an alternative for Finder, macOS built-in file manager. It comes with several handy features; however, the possibility to browse two different directories thanks to its dual-pane layout is probably the most popular.
If you have used dual-pane file managers before, Nimble Commander will surely look quite familiar. In this respect, those users who prefer using the keyboard over the mouse are likely to be pleased by the possibility of performing practically any operation just by using shortcuts. Of course, learning key combinations for more than a hundred operations may be too much. Still, you do not have to know all of them, as typing the most frequently used are enough to boost your productivity. Fortunately, the application allows opening various pairs on locations simultaneously on different tabs. Moreover, doing so does not seem to affect performance or demand more hardware resources.
Nimble Commander has other features which deserve your attention. For instance, it allows performing searches using its built-in function but also integrates with Spotlight. Similarly, the tool lets you preview the contents of the selected file. Also, when managing a long list of files, it is possible to rename batches using a given pattern. Good news is that it also allows browsing the contents of archives just as you would do with a standard folder, which contributes to saving time as you do not need to unzip the whole archive to extract a specific item.
In terms of accessing remote directories, Nimble Commander supports various protocols and services, including FTP, SFTP and WebDAV. Luckily, you can browse their contents just as you do with local folders. Additionally, there is a built-in transfer manager, which comes in particularly useful when moving large amounts of data.
In short, Nimble Commander is a product I strongly recommend. Yet, this does not mean it is free from drawbacks. In this sense, I would like the tool to support a wider range of archive formats. Besides, it would be good if there were a vertical scrollbar to help me browse through long lists.
It is great that there is a trial version available from the developer’s site, which is a great opportunity to explore many other features you may find convenient. Likewise, there is free version downloadable from the Mac App Store, but it has multiple limitations resulting from its running in sandbox mode. Finally, should you be satisfied with your experience, you can upgrade to its Pro version (paid).
v1.4
- Updated for macOS Ventura.
- [Pro features] Now supports opening compressed non-archived files with these extensions: .bz2, .gz, .lz, .lz4, .lzma, .lzo, .xz, .z, .zst.
- Find Files and (De-)Select by Mask now both support masks based on regular expressions.
- Reformatted the UI of the Find Files dialog to make it more laconic.
- Themes are now following the current macOS appearance, automatically switching between the two selected themes whenever the system-wide appearance changes. That's configurable and can be disabled. By default, the built-in "Light" and "Dark" themes are selected.
- Added two new hotkeys: Shift+Cmd+Left/Right to focus the left/right panel.
- Now scrolling caused by keypresses is instantaneous by default for both Brief and List presentation modes. The "filePanel.presentation.smoothScrolling" config setting controls this behaviour.
- [Pro features] Batch Rename now picks a longest filename to select a range of characters from.
- Improved the robustness of in-place renaming, that fixes the situations when a filesystem change discarded the in-place editor.
- Improved the robustness of the filesystem notifications handling. Now NC tries to rely on system notifications whenever possible but also keeps a backup in case the events don't come.
- Now switching to a Single-Pane mode and then back to Dual-Pane mode preserves the proportion between the panels.
- Fixed an issue with moving items into the ".." directory.
- Fixed a performance degradation when calculating directories sizes in a massive listing.
- Fixed an issue with dragging a file into NC when a Full Disk Access was not granted, which could end up in an error.
- Fixed an issue with incorrect horizontal alignment of a scroller in the Brief presentation mode.
- Fixed the visual glitches in the Dark mode caused by transparency of the List view headers.
- Cmd-Backspace no longer moves an item to Trash when it's being renamed via in-place filename editor.
- Fixed a visual glitch of wrongly truncated filenames being when they could fit entirely.
- [Pro features] Fixed an issue with WebDAV that the MOVE request wasn't conforming to the RFC and could fail on some servers.
- Fixed an issue that cloud-based file providers caused huge resources consumption when browsing these directories.
- Improved the consistency of the custom hotkeys handling. Now non-menu actions rely on hotkey characters instead of key codes as previously.
- Fixed a visual glitch when Brief Mode wasn’t displaying items until manually scrolled.
- Fixed a sporadic deadlock in the native VFS happened when setting up listeners to notifications of the filesystem events.
- Fixed a QuickLook crash when switching between some PDF files.
- Fixed a UI crash that could happen when filenames contain newline symbols.
- Many other fixes, improvements and optimizations.
