Dissatisfied with explorer.exe? Find drag-and-drop and manual window placement tedious? Like using the keyboard? Don’t want to choose between the hundreds of Norton Commander clones? You should try Proto.
Proto is a fast, weird, original, keyboard-controlled file manager written by Mieszko Lassota. You get tabs, incremental subsequence filtering everywhere (eg. ‘mp3’ matches things like ‘my panda <3’ and ‘badtimes.mp3’), renaming using regexes, an application launcher, and a nifty way to select groups of files, even if they’re across filters or directories.
Proto doesn’t seem to use the registry so just put it somewhere comfortable and run the executable.
We’re on Windows, so press F1 to get help in the form of key bindings for the current tab. There are different types of tabs, like file manager, program launcher, calculator, etc., and help is context sensitive, bringing up the commands for the current tab. Type some characters to filter the commands. Press Escape to escape help.
Unlike in most of the other tab types which filter by subsequence, in help filtering is done by substring.
Once it’s running you can call up the Proto window by pressing Alt-` (that’s a backtick). This key can be changed in $PROTODIR/Settings/Proto.xml.
Ctrl-t opens a new file manager tab. Ctrl-shift-t duplicates the current tab. Shift-return opens a directory in a new tab.
Ctrl-w closes a tab.
Ctrl-tab, ctrl-shift-tab, ctrl-<arrow>, and ctrl-<number> let you select tabs. Ctrl-shift-<arrow> reorders a tab.
Use the arrow keys to change which item in the tab is highlighted. To descend into a highlighted directory, press enter. Press backspace to go up a directory. Pressing enter will also open a highlighted file with its default program. Press tab to bring up the launcher and open the highlighted item with a different program. If any items are selected they will be opened instead of the highlighted item.
Selected items are prepended by a bullet. If no items are selected the currently highlighted item is used as the selection for commands that take a filepath.
Space selects the currently highlighted item. Ctrl-a selects all the items, and pressing it again when everying is already selected deselects everything. Alt-a toggles between selecting all files and directories. Shift-down selects the current item and highlights the next one. Shift-right behaves similarly, but on columns.
You can type a few characters to filter the contents of a tab using subsequence search. Backspace does what you’d expect. Ctrl-Backspace clears the filter. You can’t usually have spaces in your filter because the space key selects the current item in the tab.
Cut, copy, and paste behave differently in Proto than they do in Explorer. Copy (Ctrl-c) puts filepaths in the clipboard, and then the clipboard is used as input for the cut and paste commands. Cut (Ctrl-x) moves the files in the clipboard to the tab’s current location, while paste (Ctrl-v) copies files. So instead of choosing up front whether you’re going to move or copy files like in Explorer, in Proto you first choose which paths you want to work with, and then choose whether to copy or move after navigating to the destination.
Alt-c appends the selection to the clipboard.
Delete deletes the selection.
Ctrl-n creates a new directory. Ctrl-space displays the size of the selection in the lower right.
Ctrl-r lets you rename the highlighted item. Ctrl-Shift-r lets you rename the selection using regular expressions. Captured groups can be accessed in the replacement using $1, $2, etc.
The launcher can be invoked from inside or outside of Proto using Alt-space. To get Proto to index the Start Menu so the launcher is useful, ensure settings.links.indexMenuStart is set to True in $PROTODIR/Settings/AppLauncher.xml.
Alt-1 opens a tab of bookmarks to your favourite directories and files. Ctrl-b adds a bookmark to the highlighted directory.
Ctrl-f searches recursively for files using wildcards (* and ?) or regular expressions.
The grep (“Regex search IN files”) function doesn’t seem to work, unfortunately. It always crashes for me.