FinkCommander – Easily Install Unix Software from a GUI
In our “Ten OS X Command Line utilities you might not know about” article, we briefly mentioned FinkCommander, a GUI frontend to the ‘fink’ command line utility. It is the easiest way we know of to explore the wonderful world of free Unix software on the Mac. We think it is such a useful app that we decided to pay some special attention to it.
FinkCommander is a great way to quickly and painlessly search for and install Unix software without messing around in the terminal. Simply type in the name of what you are looking for and click install – it is that easy, whether you’re installing Gimp (Gimp is an open source image editing program, like Photoshop) or Irssi (Irssi is a clean and powerful command line IRC client). Useful for command line newbies and experts alike! BTW, for FinkCommander to function properly, ‘fink’ needs to be installed, available for download here. Feel free to ask any questions!
MacPorts is better. Though Fink has a GUI, it is overly complex and the ports are not very up-to-date.
[...] MacPorts, formerly DarwinPorts, is a free opensource app that allows Mac users to easily install command line software in Mac OS X. If this sounds to you like Fink, well, you’d be right because it’s pretty close. Functionality is much the same, but some people swear that MacPorts (or Fink) is better than the other. MacPorts is probably best for more advanced Mac users who have some experience with the command line, because MacPorts itself is also a command line tool. [...]
i test FinkCommander – good file browser