- Run Far for the first time to create default registry entries. Close it. Run it again with the -r switch to enter your registration, if you have one - follow the instructions in the order email. Close it again.
- Right-click the Far desktop shortcut and select Properties.
- On the Shortcut tab, in the Target field, add -aw -co as command-line parameters, outside the quotation marks. These parameters cause Far to not to look for plugins. This is ok, because all plugins have been read the first time you ran it, there is no need to do it again. With these switches Far starts a lot faster. You need to remove (and later re-add) these if you install a new plugin for Far, so its plugin cache is updated with the new plugin.
- On the Options tab, set Number of buffers to 1. Check Discard old duplicates and uncheck QuickEdit mode.
- On the Font tab, select a font size that you like. I use only raster fonts; the screenshot uses 7x12.
- On the Layout tab, specify a window size for the Far window. The default (80x25) is normally waaay to small; I use 120x50. Make sure you change both Screen buffer size and Window size. You can specify a position if you want to, I never tried that.
- If you want to, you can use the Colors tab to customize the 16 colors available to the console window. The number of colors is limited, but you can customize the actual colors. Normally, the default colors are fine, but sometimes I lighten some of the darker colors. It depends on the brightness you use with your monitor.
- Click Ok.
- You're done! Far is now set up properly, you can start using it. You may want to drag the Far icon to the taskbar (next to the Start button), so that you can run it with a single click. (Desktop shortcuts must be run by double-clicking them.)
Here is some tips about using Far:
In my experience, Far is extremely flexible and fast, but expect a bit of a learning curve. Far can be used with a mouse, if that's what you prefer. However, everyone I know of to use Far eventually starts using the keyboard, simply because it is an order of magnitude faster than the mouse. This is not because of Far, but simply because of the clumsiness of the mouse. In Far, there is a keyboard shortcut for almost everything. For things without a keyboard shortcut, you can still use the menu or you can define and assign macros to new keystroke combinations: this way you can actually assign new keyboard shortcuts to features without one. (I never had to do this, the default shortcuts were more than enough to me.)
Also, do realize, that using the mouse for every feature would be quite impossible, simply because of the limited controls on the mouse. So, even though every feature can be used with a mouse (really), it's not necessarily the most convenient way of doing things. You don't, however, have to actually type in commands to run programs, etc., as in a pure console; keyboard shortcuts simplify this greatly. (You can type in commands, if you want to.)
The Far window
You can divide the Far window into 6 major parts: the 2 file panels, the command line (right under the file panels), the function line (under the the command line), the console (behind the file panels) and the menu (invisible by default.) You can also have multiple file viewers and text editors at the same time.
You can close Far by pressing F10 or by clicking the 'X' button. Lengthy operations can be cancelled by pressing Esc.
Menu
You can open the menu by pressing F9 or by left-clicking the very top of the file panels. Press Esc or click outside the menu to dismiss it. Some of the features can be accessed through the menu if you use a mouse.
Note, that Far doesn't save any setting changes, unless you tell it to. This is a good thing (it can be bad, too, if you change a lot of things and forget to save, but it's still better than unknowingly overwriting some setting.) So if you start playing with settings and accidentally mess up something, just restart Far to get back to the original settings. You can save your current configuration into the registry by pressing Shift+F9. This does not update the FarSave1.reg and FarSave2.reg files. If you want to back up your settings (which you should, after you decide you like them), you need to run the C:\Program Files\SaveSettings.bat file and back up the two resulting reg files.
File panels
The file panels show file information. Occasionally, plugins show some information here, either in a file-list format (like the temporary files plugin, or the FTP plugin), or in some other format. The two panels can point to the same folder or different ones, on different drives or computers. The active panel is the one with the selection cursor bar.
The panels show detailed file information
Change left panel drive: click 'n' in top left corner or Alt+F1
Change right panel drive: click 'n' in top left corner or Alt+F2
Switch panels: left-click or Tab
Show/hide left panel: Ctrl+F1
Show/hide right panel: Ctrl+F2
Show/hide both panels (to see the console): Ctrl+O (oh)
Swap panels: Ctrl+U
You can use the up/down/pgup/pgdown/home/end keys to navigate the active file panel. You can use the selection cursor bar to highlight a single file/folder or you can select a set of files/folders for an operation. Selected files/folders are normally unselected after the operation completes. If a selection includes a folder, all subfolders and files in all those subfolders will be part of the operation. With proper archive setup, you can even apply all these operations to compressed files (zip, rar, etc.)
An operation is always performed on the active panel. So you can have a selection in the left panel and a single file selected in the active right panel, a copy operation would affect only the single file. The selection in the inactive left panel wouldn't change after the copy.
Select/unselect a file/folder: right-click the file or Ins or Shift+up/down/pgup/pgdown/home/end
Invert selection in the active panel: Gray *
Select files/folders by file mask: Gray +
Unselect files/folders by file mask: Gray -
You can copy/move files/folders between the file panels.
Copy files/folders: left-click and drag selection to the other side or F5
Move files/folders: Shift+left-click and drag selection to the other side or F6
If you drag the files/folders onto a folder in the target panel, the files will be copied/moved into that folder. You can change the target folder (or even the target file name) by changing the dialog options.
You can also rename or delete a file/folder (or a selection) and change file properties.
Rename a file/folder: F6
Delete a file/folder: F8 (deletes to Recycle Bin)
Really delete a file/folder: Shift+Del (doesn't use Recycle Bin, the file/folder is really deleted - be very careful with this)
Wipe file/folder: Alt+Del (like the previous one, but also wipes the content, so it cannot be recovered)
Change file/folder properties: Ctrl+A
View the Windows Property page of a file: this is not supported by Far directly, but the Explorer Menu (EMenu) plugin does it. You can create a keyboard macro to assign a shortcut to it.
You can run programs or files (really, the program associated with the file), just move the selection cursor bar over the file and use one of the following:
Run program: double-click or Enter (this passes the file through plugins, so some files may not actually execute. An example would be Word documents: there is a plugin that lets you explore the internals of Office files, so if you double-click a Word document file, Word will not start, but the plugin will show the file internals.)
Run program: Shift+double-click or Shift+Enter (this avoids plugins, so all files are opened with their associated program. You can use this to avoid plugins taking over.)
Copy selected file/folder name to the command-line: Ctrl+Enter (this is useful if you want to specify command-line parameters to a program before running it)
Folder shortcuts and common commands
If you have folders that you use frequently, you can assign shortcuts to them, from RightCtrl+0 to RightCtrl+9. This is available from the menu. Don't forget to save the options after you change this.
For frequently used commands, you can create a user menu (again, from the menu) and open the user menu by pressing F2 when the file panels are active.
Command-line
The command line can be used to run programs with or without additional command-line parameters or switches. It's useful to run console programs (like ipconfig), as console program output is shown by Far. To execute a command in the command-line, press Enter.
Note, that the command-line takes precedence over the file panels: if you have something typed in the command-line - even if you have a selection in the active file panel - the command-line command will be executed. The command-line is cleared after executing a command. To retrieve past commands, press Ctrl+E. You can also press Alt+F8 to open the command history list.
Function line
The function line lists function keys (from F1 to F12) and shows the actual function of each key in the current context. Notice, that pressing Shift, Ctrl or Alt changes the functions - you'll see that many of the features I listed above are readily accessible with a mouse click on a function key in the function line. So if you want to copy a file, you can either press F5 or you can click 5Copy in the function line. Every feature is also available through the menu.
File viewer
Far's file viewer can be used to view the actual physical content of a file. So, if you view the content of a jpg file, you won't see the image, you'll see the bytes in the image file. To see the image, run the file (Enter/Shift+Enter.) The file viewer is still very useful to view text files and to look for text in binary files. To view a file, press F3 or 5 on the numeric keypad. You can have any number of file viewers open, switch between them (and the file panels) by pressing Ctrl+Tab.
Use up/down/pgup/pgdown/home/end to navigate the file. Press F7 to search in the file and Shift+F7 to search again. Press F6 to switch to editing the file.
Text editor
The built-in text editor is a very powerful text editor (like Notepad, just better.) To edit a file, press F4. You can also create and edit a new file, just press Shift+F4 for that. Note, that the text editor in Far edits the physical content of the file. In case of a text file, it's the text itself, but in case of binary files (like Word documents) you can also edit the binary content, which can damage the file beyond repair. So when editing binary files, make sure you know what you're doing (it's normally better to use a hex editor for binary files - there is a plugin for that.) To edit a file in its associated program, move the selection cursor bar over the file and press Shift+Enter.
The keys are the same as in the file viewer. Additionally, you can use Ctrl+F7 to replace text in the file and F2 to save any changes. You can have any number of text editors, you can switch between them with Ctrl+Tab.
Using compressed files from the command-line
Creating compressed files from Far can be done through the Explorer Menu (EMenu plugin); just make a selection and press F11 and invoke the EMenu plugin to show the context menu with options for Winzip or Winrar. To uncompress a compressed file, you can either press Shift+Enter to launch the associated archiver program or you can enter the compressed file (by pressing Enter on the file), selecting the files to uncompress and pressing F5. The result is that the selected files will be copied out of the compressed file to the other panel. For this to work with WinZip, you need to get and install the WinZip command-line extension and copy wzzip.exe and wzunzip.exe to the Windows folder. If you use WinRar, you need to copy rar.exe and unrar.exe to the Windows folder from the WinRar folder. For other archivers you may need to tweak the options to properly set up file paths so that Far can find them.
Limitations of Far
Even though Far is very powerful and flexible, it does have a few shortcomings. Most of these are very minor and occur rarely, so I found it easy to live with them - all other features easily compensate for these.
No Unicode filename handling: if a filename contains accented letters, Far may not recognize the filename. With Hungarian letters, the two problematic are ő and ű. Since I never use accented letters in filenames, this is rarely a problem for me - mostly when I get files from others.
No copy between Windows Explorer and Far: you cannot drag-and-drop files from one into the other. There is a plugin that allows this, but I don't use it because it runs as a separate process (it's an exe) and I don't like that fact. Since Windows Explorer is crap anyway, this is rarely a problem, if ever, for me.
Far sometimes crashes when dealing with archives (zip, rar, etc.) I'm not sure if this is a problem with Far or the archive plugin (my guess is the plugin.) This happens every once in a while and the only solution is to kill Far. It's a bit annoying, but to me the convenience of using everything inside Far outweighs the rare inconvenience of terminating it when it crashes. This is the only occasion when I saw Far crashing.
Lengthy operations all happen in the foreground, so Far is unusable during an operation. My solution is to let Far finish its task. If I need to do something in the meantime, I open a new Far instance. There is a plugin that moves some (maybe all?) lengthy operations to the background, but I don't use it, because it's an exe plugin. Others use it.
This is pretty much it. There are a lot more features (especially because of all the available plugins), but exploring those is left as an exercise to the reader.