I like tweaking, but definitely not too much tweaking – that burns me out. I think Total Commander is nice balance of defaults you can use out of the box, but can deeply customize for yourself as well.

I’ve spent DOS times mostly on Volkov Commander and later on Dos Navigator. Later was seriously more advanced than all of competition.

Everything rocks for search indeed. It’s a rare case for app to do something so simple in so awesome way.

Rolls Royce file manager = Directory Opus.
Price = also Rolls Royce.

And yes, as you say, it is “about twice the price of Total Commander? It sure is expensive. Well, if it is still afloat then worth it to some people.”

Besides an immense lot of features it offers next to complete configurability, which means, it works practically exactly as a file manager would work if I had designed it from scratch to exactly my liking. This includes, that I can replace icons if I don’t like the suggested one – an each icon can have a left, right and middle click functionality. So you can cram a lot of functionality into little space.

If it happens to have a bug, I post it in the forum and I can be reasonably sure that it is fixed inside the next couple of minor updates. For me it took a while to configure it, killing of some garish colours, etc., but this is a “once in a lifetime” job, and the configuration is easily transferable, including to USB, from where it also works effortlessly.

For a long time I used “PowerDesk Explorer”, which I liked a lot, but they never removed what for me was a major bug. I also liked xlplorer² for a while, because it was cute, but in the end it was a romance that never really worked out and I never elevated it to Explorer replacement. Of the rest, I don’t know what I have not tried – Even ZTree, a character based (means MS-Dos mode) file manager, created with the fabulous XTree of the MS-Dos days in mind; then you were either a Norton Commander or an Xtree person ;).

For me the file manager is the most important tool on the computer, and I almost always have it open. The only other tool I need here is “Everything” (http://www.voidtools.com/), which I think you recommended a while ago, and which became quickly indispensable for me. No quicker way to find a file by name – no matter where on the computer.

@kelltic
XYplorer have very interesting approach with internal script engine, but misses another few features.
About Xplorer2, well I liked more his predecessor 2xExplorer.

Thanks, I know those features but forgot to include in post. Hadn’t used multi rename lately, but own associations is awesome for portable.

btw file queues are listed in post. :)

@kelltic

I stick with defaults for those, but fonts and colors are very customizable.

In case of Total Commander you can take your time and evaluate all functions properly before purchase. Excellent policy indeed.

I consider Windows Explorer absolutely unusable as file manager. It is poor attempt to dumb down file managing, haunted by performance and usability issues as far as I can remember.

I tried this – and every similar program I could find – back when I was looking for something to replace Windows Explorer. I did like Total Commander but, in the end, I purchased Xplorer2. Probably not one of my better decisions and the functions, available in the pro version that prompted me to upgrade from the freebie, turned out to be too cumbersome to bother with and didn’t work all the time. Another one I liked was XYplorer – for its speediness. Funny thing is, once I installed Search GT, I went back to using Windows Explorer.

I think Total Commander was a little beyond my comprehension and I was too impatient to learn how to use it. Looking at the pic here I remember I didn’t like the heavy bold text. Well, I’m a little (very little) wiser now and when I’m ready to purchase another such program, it will be this one. Gotta love the developer’s attitude. Makes me want to pay up right now.

Over all in my opinion this is the best file manager.