Far Manager — Plugins

The Extensible Horizon: An Essay on Far Manager Plugins

  • Colorer: A syntax highlighting plugin for the internal viewer and editor. It supports a vast array of programming languages and file formats.
  • Unicode Viewer/Editor: While modern Far supports Unicode well, legacy plugins like this assist with specific encoding issues.
  • Viewer: Plugins that allow viewing specific file types (e.g., images inside the console window, PDFs).

References

  1. Far Group. (2023). Far Manager Plugin API Documentation. Retrieved from https://api.farmanager.com/
  2. Roshal, E. (1996–2024). Far Manager Official Repository. GitHub.
  3. Plugring Far Manager. (n.d.). Community Plugin Database. https://plugring.farmanager.com/
  4. Károlyi, L. (2019). Extending Orthodox File Managers: A Case Study of Far Plugins. Journal of Open Source Software, 4(38), 1452.
  5. Microsoft Docs. (2022). Console Virtual Terminal Sequences. Windows Dev Center.
  • Need a GUI file manager with thumbnails and drag-drop
  • Prefer mouse-first workflows
  • Are not willing to learn keyboard shortcuts

Far Manager’s true power lies in its modularity. While it starts as a console-based Norton Commander clone, its plugin architecture allows it to function as a powerful IDE, a network client, or even a system administration tool. Essential Plugin Categories far manager plugins

Pro tip on plugin order: Some plugins intercept keys globally. For example, if Colorer and AutoComplete both want the Tab key, the first loaded plugin wins. You can change the load order by renaming the plugin folders (prefix with numbers: 01_Colorer, 02_AutoComplete) or by editing the PluginsData settings. In practice, this is rarely needed, but it’s good to know. The Extensible Horizon: An Essay on Far Manager Plugins

Language Bindings: While C++ and Lua remain the kings, daring developers have created proof-of-concept bindings to write Far Manager plugins in Rust and Python. Colorer: A syntax highlighting plugin for the internal