File Explorer Alternative

July 4, 2006 3:32 AM

A File Explorer Replacement? (hopefully shareware)

I'm looking for a file explorer replacement, something more streamlined and helpful than Windows XP's clunky explorer. Something like Norton Commander for old Ms-DOS would be great (duel windows, etc...) Please don't recommend Power Desk by VCOm, the interface is surprisingly slow and a resource hog to boot!

posted by nosophoros to computers & internet (12 comments total)

In Russia, Total Commander is really, really popular. I'm getting used to it and it seems to be worth the money.
posted by fake at 3:45 AM on July 4, 2006

I can't work without xplorer2 but it's a commercial product, albeit pretty cheap (about £15). 21-day trial available.
posted by blag at 4:15 AM on July 4, 2006

Total Commander absolutely, absolutely rocks. I've been using it for about 6 years. It's always the first thing I install onto a PC (xcopy install at that!).

One thing that helped me when learning it was to print out the keyboard shortcut list and leave it on my desk - there's a shortcut for everything, so it is also a great intro to what the prog can do.

Also, after installing, you'll probably want to go to the Configuration...Options menuitem, then turn off display of some of the UI components, like button bar, etc. Helps reduce clutter...
posted by gage at 4:15 AM on July 4, 2006

Discussion from Feb. 2005 about shells and file managers, hopefully still worth reading.

I tried a bunch of Explorer replacements a year or so ago and I always found brown M&Ms even if it was just things like poor English localization or nasty icons. Some of these products may well have improved by now, or you may have a higher tolerance for such things.

If you don't find anything you like, it's easy to do multiple panes using the tiling feature in Windows (which is well worth knowing how to make good use of anyway - it's indispensable any time you're working with more than one window at a time). Something you may not know is that you can select multiple windows on the taskbar by control-clicking on them; you can then just right click and select "Tile Horizontally". In combination with using Windows-E to open Explorer you can work pretty quickly this way.

Also there are a few Explorer customizations in Tweak UI that you might like, including the ability to force it to use classic search.
posted by teleskiving at 4:49 AM on July 4, 2006

Directory Opus is easily superior to all the file managers I've tried. Functionality and configuration-wise it has everything you would want. But the greatest aspect of it is that it was well programmed. They wrote it completely multi-threaded and efficient. So when you perform one operation you don't need to wait for it to do the next one. It doesn't crash, jam or impede you in any way, which I can't say for other managers (for example ExplorerPlus pales in comparison).
posted by blueyellow at 5:19 AM on July 4, 2006

I second Directory Opus, it really is the best.

See Link for a nice tutorial showing off some of the features.
posted by Akke at 5:38 AM on July 4, 2006

There is a "lite" version of xplorer2, which is free. It still remains lightweight, stable, fast, incredibly feature-rich, and configurable, however. I also liked A43, which while not as fast or stable (in my experience) as the aforementioned xplorer2, has usable features integrated and can be carried along on a thumb drive. But really, xplorer2 is teh shit.
posted by youarenothere at 5:41 AM on July 4, 2006

I'm addicted to Total Commander. I'm using the PowerPack version, wich adds a ginormous amount of plugins (including access to Config Screen, (S)FTP, image thumbnails etc.
posted by Harry at 7:07 AM on July 4, 2006

Comparison of featureset of just about all the major file manager options available to you.

I wanted to be objective with this post, but I have to give the nod to DOpus. It's dope -us.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 8:08 AM on July 4, 2006

I've also been a Total Commander man since the very early Windows days. Love it.
posted by frenetic at 8:27 AM on July 4, 2006

In that 2005 thread, I mentioned Servant Salamander 1.52. I'm still a fan.
posted by box at 11:27 AM on July 4, 2006

Directory Opus is absolutely neccesary. It's increidbly smart and configurable, fast, etc. Try it & you'll never look back.
posted by signal at 2:17 PM on July 4, 2006