Previously, I’ve written about alternate file browsers. For the Mac, there were programs such as Yep and Leap, which allow you to browse your PDFs and documents. For Linux, there are the standard file browsers, such as Konqueror and Nautilus, as well as Thunar and recently a file browser for your Panel, called File Browser Applet.
But today I’m taking a look at something that is a file browser… and not. The name of the project is Nemo, and according to the application’s About screen, “Nemo is a file manager for those who would rather have their files manage themselves.
And that pretty much sums it up. Although it should be said that Nemo really isn’t a file browser. At least, not in the “classic” sense of what a file browser does. Typically, a file browser allows a user to navigate through his/her file system, opening, moving, copying, deleting and otherwise managing the files and folders on the computer. Nemo doesn’t do that.
Nemo, by comparison, allows you to view, label, star and open any document… that you’ve previously opened. Nemo watches what you do all day, marking down when files are added, deleted or opened, and those files then show up on Nemo’s calendar.
That’s right. Far from the typical two-pane or single-pane file browser, such as Apple’s Finder, Nemo uses a calendar. How does that work? Pretty simply, actually.
Simply click on the blue icon Nemo places in your Panel, and you’ll see the current month’s calendar. Filling each day of that month is a full list of the files you have opened or otherwise viewed during that day. Double click on an item, and Nemo will cause it to be opened by that file’s default program, or you can choose to open it with something else. With Nemo, you can also view the folder holding that item, as well as copy the path to the item to your clipboard. Nemo also has a couple of tagging features, such as the ability to tag an item with a particular label that you provide, or to star it.
I really like the tagging aspect of Nemo. This makes it trivial, after you’ve tagged all the items that you’re currently using for a particular project, to view them all, simply by viewing all the items you’ve tagged, or by searching for that tag. And the same could be done with the star features as well.
Finally, Nemo offers multiple views of your files. You can, by default, view that current month’s file activity, but that will likely be too crowded to be of much use. Because of this (Nemo can really only display two or three items per day in month view), Nemo allows users to view their file activity in week view or day view. You can also, especially in day view, get a good preview of the document (a feature you can also receive in month view by simply hovering over the document).
I don’t know that Nemo is currently at a point where I would use it every day, to be honest. I like the idea of it, but the way I use documents is in a very disposable way. I’ll write an article for Associated Content, see that it’s been accepted, and then delete the text and images. So I don’t tend to hang around to documents too much, so being able to go back and view those documents (which would have disappeared from Nemo’s view once they were deleted from my hard drive anyway), is of little value to me. Still, for those who – as Nemo’s developer says – would rather their files manage themselves – Nemo is a very interesting program.
