Great Android Apps: Ghost Commander

Ghost Commander is an open source file 
manager available from Sourceforge[1], 
F-Droid, or Google Play (if you must).

It has a couple of interesting quirks. 
One involves navigation. If you touch 
a file on the left hand side of the 
screen, Ghost Commander will attempt 
to open it. If you touch the file on 
the right hand side of the screen, the 
file will be selected and you can 
them choose an operation (move, copy, 
delete, etc.). You can also touch a 
number of files on the right side to 
select a group of files and conduct a 
batch operation.

The other oddity involves copying and 
moving files. Ghost commander is a 
dual panel file manager (although you 
can set up the panels to be like tabs 
and only view one at a time). When you 
select a file in one panel and choose 
to move or copy it, the file is moved 
or copied to the location in the other 
panel. So in practice, you first 
navigate to the file you want to move 
or copy in one panel, then go to the 
other panel and navigate to the 
destination directory, and then go 
back and perform the move/copy 
function. As noted, it's odd, but it 
works well enough.

But Ghost Commander's greatest 
strength is perhaps unintended. Some 
time ago I wrote about keeping my 
calendar, contacts, and tasks in plain 
text files.[2]

Ghost Commander is the perfect app for 
doing that, because it has the ability 
to send shortcuts to files and folders 
to the Android home screen.

So, you can create a calendar text 
file, and place a link/icon for it on 
the home screen.

Likewise, you can set up a contacts 
text file, and place a link to it on 
the home screen.

Finally, you can do the same with 
folders. So you can put a shortcut 
icon for a folder that you'll put your 
notes in -- as separate text files -- 
on the home screen.

Even better, if you use a custom 
launcher, like Nova Launcher, you can 
rename those files if necessary, and 
change the icons -- to a calendar 
icon, a contacts icon, and a notes 
icon. You get the idea.

And here's the best part: they'll all 
open automatically with Ghost 
Commander, which has a built-in text 
editor.

A nice easter egg: if you have phone 
numbers in the contacts file, long 
press on them and options to call or 
text those numbers will appear. 

Install syncthing and you can keep 
your plain text PIM files synced to 
your other computers. 

[1] https://sourceforge.net/projects/ghostcommander/

[2] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~visiblink/phlog/20190106