Far Manager features an internal viewer and editor, customizable user menus, tree views, file search, compare, integrated help, and a task switcher for its tools. Its standard functionality can be expanded with macros and plugins. Far Manager's default interface combines two file panels with a command prompt. Panels may be fully customized as to which columns are shown and in which order, and operations may be done to and from either panel. The file panels support wildcard selection, advanced filtering, sorting and highlighting. The file panels and the command prompt are both active at the same time, and most features can be accessed using keyboard shortcuts.
Extensibility
Far's standard functionality can be greatly extended with macros and plugins. Standard plugins installed by default include FTP, Windows network, extensible archive file support and temporary panel virtual file systems, a process list, print manager, filename case converter, and several editor plugins to format, wrap, and otherwise alter text. Third-party plugins are available from the repository and . Some popular plugins include regular expression search and replace, syntax highlighting and auto-completion for the text editor, SFTP/SCP and Windows Registry virtual file systems, 7-zip integration, a hex editor and a picture viewer. Wrappers are available which allow using some Total Commander plugins with Far Manager, and vice versa. Plugins can be developed using the native C/Pascal API, or using wrappers which permit plugin development in other platforms and languages, such as.NET, and Lua.
Linux and MacOS version
project develops Linux and MacOS ports of Far Manager. As for now, port successfully builds and most common functions work as expected. Among ported and working plugins there are FarFTP, Colorer, MultiArc, TmpPanel.
Licensing
Far Manager is available under the revised BSD license. Originally, Far Manager was available as 40 days shareware for everyone except for citizens of the former USSR countries, who could use it as freeware for non-commercial use only. On 26 October 2007, the source code for the Unicode development version was released under the revised BSD license. On 17 May 2010 the 1.x branch has also been released under the revised BSD license, though without source code.