Recently, a beta release of the file manager f4 0.3.0 has been published. This project aims to replicate the interface, behavior, and internal structure of Far Manager and far2l. However, f4 0.3.0 is written from scratch in Go, utilizing the “clean room” methodology. The code is available under the BSD license and has been developed by AI assistants. The project follows a manual review process instead of relying on a large set of automated tests, which are still conducted in CI across various operating systems and architectures.
The file manager provides ready-made assemblies for multiple platforms including Linux, Windows (including a specific assembly for Windows 7/8/8.1), ReactOS, macOS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, DragonFly BSD, and Android (Termux). Additionally, experimental support is provided for Illumos and Solaris, with work underway to port the f4 0.3.0 to Redox, GNU Hurd, and Haiku.
Key features of f4 0.3.0 include delivery as a single statically assembled executable file with no external dependencies, support for architectures like x86-64, x86, ARM64, ARMv7, RISC-V, LoongArch, MIPS, and POWER. Users can choose to work in a terminal or a separate graphics window, with the terminal supporting the kitty protocol and Win32 Input Mode.
In graphics mode, multiple backends such as X11, Wayland, Win32 GDI, Cocoa, Ebitengine, and gogpu with hardware acceleration are available. The file manager also offers a built-in terminal below the panels, akin to far2l. On Windows, this feature works both through ConPTY and the Windows Console API. Moreover, f4 0.3.0 comes with a built-in editor featuring syntax highlighting (Colorer and Chroma) and a viewer with a hex dump viewing mode, capable of opening large files without loading the entire file into memory.