dman

A really fast download manager that is tightly integrated with the browser

Dman is a download manager I built after having some inconveniences with IDM, the fastest download manager that I know of. As such, what it does internally is largely the same as IDM, but I have improved some things.

The main differences with IDM are:

• It does not have its own graphical UI. Instead, it has a browser extension that acts as the UI and communicates with it. The logic for this is that we use a download manager along with a browser most of the time. So instead of hopping back and forth between the browser and the download manager, why not attach the download manager to the browser?
• If one really needs to use it outside of the browser though, it has a simple command line interface.

Usage

As an end user

Currently, only Google Chrome on Windows is supported. It may be easy to port the extension to Firefox and the native part to Linux and Mac, and I will gladly accept any help in that.

To install, Download the zip package from the Releases page, unpack it and follow the instructions in INSTALLATION.txt

After that, any file you download will be downloaded through dman. You can pin the extension icon to the toolbar of the browser. You can interact with it by clicking the icon. The interface is designed to be easy to understand.

In another Go project

The heart of dman is the download package, and it can be imported as:

import (
    ...
    "github.com/K1DV5/dman/dman/download"
    ...
)

API documentation is in TODO. In the mean time, you can see how you can use it from dman/extension.go

In another application

dman understands the native messaging protocol of Chrome Extensions. That means you can interact with it from any program using that protocol. Again, until documentation becomes available, look at extension/background.go for an example of how you can interact with it.

Notes

Although most of the core work is done (or so I think), there are some incomplete things:

• At the moment, I focused on writing the extension for Google Chrome. It's tested with this but it may work with other Chromium based browsers. Firefox support needs to be done.
• It does not catch media on sites, like audio or video like IDM does. This may or may not be added. One argument against adding this is giving the user the freedom to choose any extension that does it. If something arrives in Downloads, this one will wait there and take it from there.