CLEX – A Versatile Command Line File Manager With Integrated Command Prompt
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Whether you are a system administrator or a normal command line user, hopping between file manager and command line can get frustrating some times. At some time or the other, you tend to look at some command line alternative to the graphical file manager that you use.
Chances are that you’ll find a decent command line manager but that would still require switching between file manager window and your command prompt window. So the question remains, is there a file manager that combines file explorer and command prompt in a single window? The answer is yes and the file manager is **CLEX**.
Clex is a command line based file manager that has a nice little user interface and provides a lot of options for file management. The main advantage of this file manager is that it also provides a command prompt (in the same window) through which you can run regular commands.
**NOTE** – All the examples presented here are tested on Ubuntu 13.04.
**A Brief Tutorial**
Here is the Clex UI when it was first executed on my machine:
So you can see that all the files and directories in the current working directory (**/home/himanshu/** in this case) were displayed in the upper half of the window. You can use the up and down arrow keys to select a file or a directory and press enter to get inside a directory.
In the lower half of the window, the file manager provides a command line prompt (bash prompt in my case). Any installed command line utility can be executed from here.
For example, to open an image file Ubuntu.png, the arrow keys were used to select it first :
Clex is certainly a feature rich command line file manager. The integration with command prompt is its USP. Minor hiccups apart, it is a time-saving utility that demands a bit of practice to get used to it.
