💾 Archived View for zaibatsu.circumlunar.space › ~visiblink › phlog › 20200430 captured on 2022-04-29 at 11:44:46.
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Great Android Apps: Ghost Commander Ghost Commander is an open source file manager available from Sourceforge[1], F-Droid, or Google Play (if you must). It has a couple of interesting quirks. One involves navigation. If you touch a file on the left hand side of the screen, Ghost Commander will attempt to open it. If you touch the file on the right hand side of the screen, the file will be selected and you can them choose an operation (move, copy, delete, etc.). You can also touch a number of files on the right side to select a group of files and conduct a batch operation. The other oddity involves copying and moving files. Ghost commander is a dual panel file manager (although you can set up the panels to be like tabs and only view one at a time). When you select a file in one panel and choose to move or copy it, the file is moved or copied to the location in the other panel. So in practice, you first navigate to the file you want to move or copy in one panel, then go to the other panel and navigate to the destination directory, and then go back and perform the move/copy function. As noted, it's odd, but it works well enough. But Ghost Commander's greatest strength is perhaps unintended. Some time ago I wrote about keeping my calendar, contacts, and tasks in plain text files.[2] Ghost Commander is the perfect app for doing that, because it has the ability to send shortcuts to files and folders to the Android home screen. So, you can create a calendar text file, and place a link/icon for it on the home screen. Likewise, you can set up a contacts text file, and place a link to it on the home screen. Finally, you can do the same with folders. So you can put a shortcut icon for a folder that you'll put your notes in -- as separate text files -- on the home screen. Even better, if you use a custom launcher, like Nova Launcher, you can rename those files if necessary, and change the icons -- to a calendar icon, a contacts icon, and a notes icon. You get the idea. And here's the best part: they'll all open automatically with Ghost Commander, which has a built-in text editor. A nice easter egg: if you have phone numbers in the contacts file, long press on them and options to call or text those numbers will appear. Install syncthing and you can keep your plain text PIM files synced to your other computers. [1] https://sourceforge.net/projects/ghostcommander/ [2] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~visiblink/phlog/20190106