The Help menu has a “Quick Guide to Using FileZilla”, which is an excellent starting point, but there are also more fully featured instructions on the various aspects of the program’s controls and display windows. The instruction manual is a great reference tool although, for the most part, using FileZilla is very intuitive. One minor thing to watch out for is that the main tool bar has a number of useful graphic icons that are not labeled, and do not seem to pop-up an explanatory text box when the mouse hovers over any of them. In fact, the text is shown on a status bar at the bottom of the program window so, while the information is available, it may not be immediately obvious.

Perhaps one of the most useful features of FileZilla is accessed through one of these icons, the R button, which stands for reconnect. Pressing the R button reestablishes a connection with the last server to which you were connected, and automatically switches to the last used folder on this server. The help file indicates that this is useful when you've lost the connection. In my case (and I suspect for most users) this is a far more useful function, since most of my FTP transfers are to a specific directory on my ISP’s web server. Thus, hitting the R button instantly connects me to where I normally want to be.

However, FileZilla has lots of ways of doing things. In addition to reconnecting to an FTP server, the program has a Server Manager where, as with most FTP utilities, one can set up and store parameters used to access a number of different FTP hosts. There is also a QuickConnect bar where basic connection parameters can be entered. A QuickConnect drop down menu can be used to access the ten most recent server connections. So, if you use several FTP servers on a regular basis, they are all easily available in this manner.

The program’s display windows are extremely flexible with just about everything being capable of being turned on or off and resized. The View menu is extremely powerful for setting up the various display windows precisely how you wish to have them configured. If the default screen layout, with its multiple windows, is too busy for you, just turn some of the windows off. There are also several ways in which the file lists for both the local and remote directories can be displayed. While I couldn’t seem to avoid the relatively large number of sub-directories being displayed for the target directory on my local machine, I could minimize their impact on the display by setting View - Local List View to “List” rather than “Details”. This eliminated the display of parameters such as the size, type, and date last modified of each file, and squeezed more file names into the window. This is my preference since I’m only interested in transferring a number of specific files from the particular target directory, and generally don’t need to know details about the individual files to be transferred.

The transfer process itself can also be initiated in several ways. Perhaps the most intuitive method is to select files on the local machine and then drag these to the remote machine’s directory window. The reverse process works if you wish to download files from a remote machine. Right clicking on a file pops-up an upload/download menu. Double clicking on a file adds it to the transfer queue and starts the transfer process automatically. Alternatively, individual files can be added to the queue and files in the queue transferred at the press of an icon.

FileZilla is an FTP utility that is very powerful and yet very easy to use. Best of all, being open source software, it’s freely available for your use.

Bottom Line:

FileZilla (Open Source)
Version 2.2.9 (26-Oct-04)
Tim Kosse et al., Open Source Technology Group
http://sourceforge.net/projects/filezilla/