This $30 File Manager Is Now Free

Does this play nicely with Copy/Move management tools like Terracopy or SuperCopier?

Hi Guys

Although this comment may appear off topic,it does address some of the issues discussed here.

Adding to Lee H's suggestion, the shortcut ( Windows + Left or Right ) to get the active Windows Explorer Window into position.For me Source Window on Left and Destination Window on Right seems natural, for copying and pasting.

Next is the excellent Windows Explorer add on " File Menu Tools " which is great for copying and pasting to your designated folders,it also addresses the folder size issue as well as many other features, and doesn't take up any space on your Windows Explorer Window.

This is a fine explorer with one exception that i noted. You can't toggle the drag move/copy action with the control key like free commander.

Wikipedia refers to these programs by the somewhat whimsical name of "orthodox file managers".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Orthodox_file_managers

If you have access to a WinNT distro, the old classic file manager is available and does run on XP. I have not tried it on Win7.

Freecommander fulfills all my needs for a file viewer. It also can show file sizes, thumbnail views, and link to network.

I will certainly give this a go as I often end up with 2 Explorer windows open for moving files about.

What I REALLY need is a better way of searching file content. The old XP search was soo much better than the nasty Win7 system where you could search in a subset of a specific file type. Why 'improve' what worked so well. Any recommendations (other than 'contents:')?

Native dual pane file navigation, brute foce: open two Windows Explorer windows and place them side by side. Now you can move/copy files from one pane to the other. If they are the only windows open and not minimized (i.e. close or minimize all other windows), right click on the task bar and select "show windows side by side"

What I would really love to have is a file manager that shows folder sizes. None of the add ons I used to use work on my 64 bit Windows 7 system and I have read it is because Microsoft changed something or other in 7 which makes calculating this impossible via the old methods and I really miss it! I have a number of external hard drives and I used to be able to make sure they were equally up to date by comparing folder sizes. Also, I could tell at a glance how many movies would fit on a data disk. Does anyone know if there is a folder size fix out there yet?

From my experience - and I have tried any file manger out there - dual pane feature is useful for some operations, especially moving/copying files. But most of the time explorer format is better. The ideal solution would be to have the dual pane as an on/off option. Some file mangers - mainly the commercial ones - have this option.

Q-Dir 4.68 Aug 1 is latest for this 2 or 4 panel one.
Can customize number of panels with default being quad
which I always change to 2 panel.
Does most tasks. has 64 bit version. Some d/l sites default to German but esaily changed to good old English.
Site also has a desktop icon layout saver prgy and others like in font category & such.

I don't doubt there are a few (rare) instances where a dual pane explorer would be handy, however .....

Surely, using a Windows Explorer replacement that has multiple Tabs, is the way to go ?
I have tested a few free ones, and can provide examples, and recommendations, if anyone is interested.

I have tried this out and for some reason it omits any folder where I have changed the folder icon from default to one of my choosing.

Hi guys:

Thanks for the finding but it's too late.

Relating to file management I'm happily married with FreeCommander. It has everything that MultiCommander has and even more; and the most important: I know all the tricks and tweaks for FreeCommander.

Additionally, I advise to everyone to use a decent File Manager; there are plenty out there; because Win Explorer is the same as IE, WMP, WMM, etc,: Useless and Hopeless. It's a shame that microsoft make us use third party apps for almost everything because the native ones are mediocre.

Remember that having a full control of data in our machines is a must.

Thanks

I've been a dual-pane guy since the days of Norton Commander, and will certainly give this one a go. These things need to be fast and stable. Looks are less important, though a neat UI also factors into speed of use.

As for making most of them, I'd say that if you tend to move around large quantities of files, you'll notice a difference even in basic use. For example, let's assume I have PDFs in folders A, B, C, D, E and I want to move them to my PDF folder. I can keep the PDF folder open in pane 2 and use pane 1 to browse to A, B, C, D, E. I can alse use a single hotkey to move files between the folders (instead of doing a ctrl+x, ctrl+v for each batch). A well made file manager is faster than Windows explorer, in terms of opening folders, sorting by attributes etc. - and if it supports tabs, you can imagine the difference by comparing windowed internet browsers vs. tabbed browsers. It all adds up.

The added features, like internal file viewers (instead of notepad) and support for EXIF, MP3 tag data etc. make these things quite useful, and well worth the extra RAM.

That being said, I'd rather give up some features to gain speed.

I've tried a lot of them; looks pretty dated.

I do like the extra view panel and certain features though I've yet to really appreciate it over the native window explorer. Perhaps someone could pt to me how to really maximise the usage of one of these managers as I still can't really justify a dual panel for 30k of memory usage.