FinkCommander - A GUI Fink package manager

Feb 03, '03 07:49:36AM

Contributed by: robg

FinkCommander iconThe macosxhints Rating:
9 of 10
[0 to 10 lights; 10 = perfect!]

If you use fink to install and use various UNIX packages (as I do), but find the command line management tools somewhat complicated (as I do; I'm forever forgetting the right syntax for the various tools, and I find the ASCII-based package manager quite confusing), then you need FinkCommander.

FinkCommander wraps the package management system in a nice Cocoa front end, displaying all available packages and their current status in your Fink installation. At a glance, you can see each package's installed version, current binary version, current stable version, current unstable version (if enabled), as well as the package's category and description. A status columns indicates if the version you have installed is current, outdated, or archived, and any column can be used as the sort key just by clicking on its header.

The bottom half of the window is reserved for output messages, exactly as you would see if running the various Fink commands directly in the Terminal. The split position can be resized just by dragging a horizontal divider up and down to give more space to either the list or output areas.

I customized the toolbar to add the install/delete binary package buttons, and now it's a matter of a couple of double-clicks to install (from binary or source) any package that I wish to use. Since installing FinkCommander, I find I'm doing a much better job of keeping current with my various Fink installations.

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