FILE BUDDY ALTERNATIVES FOR WINDOWS INSTALL
FILE BUDDY ALTERNATIVES FOR WINDOWS WINDOWS

The app always has two panes open, but you can hide either of them by clicking the small arrows on its edge. With this app, tabs and a dark mode are just the beginning. If you want a balanced combination of style and substance, you should check out One Commander. The app takes several seconds to load, even on a modern system, but if you use it for anything that takes longer than opening a single file, those seconds won't mean much to you. The main drawback of the app is that it's bloated with features that you probably aren't looking for in a file explorer, such as the ability to stream audio from another device via Bluetooth. The app has limited tagging abilities, as you can put blue, purple, green and orange tags on files by right-clicking on them and then clicking the heart icon, but the app doesn't support verbal tags or searching by tag, so that feature will only benefit you if you remember what each color means to you. There you can also choose to restore the last open tab on startup. In Settings > Personalize, you can choose not only between white and black background colors for the menus, but also any acrylic background color with any level of transparency, a background picture of your choice, or to use Bing's image of the day.

FILE BUDDY ALTERNATIVES FOR WINDOWS WINDOWS

In Settings > Advanced, you can choose to disable the extended context menu, and set Win + E as a Windows shortcut to start the app.

Under Settings > Basic, you can move the navigation menu to the left side of the screen for more vertical space (you can also remove icons from that menu by right-clicking on any of them and then 'customize'), and even better, choose the font of the in-app text. The paid version ( $2.50) also supports a dual-pane mode and in-app encryption features. Key features include tabs and in-app tools that let you view and edit images and videos, and even transcode them into different file formats. If you want something with more style than Windows' default, then RX Explorer is an interesting option. Under Settings > Experimental, you can enable tags, and make Files the OS' default file explorer.

In Settings > Multitasking, you can enable dual-pane view (which you can close at any time after clicking on the ellipsis symbol). In Settings > On Startup, you can choose to continue where you left off when launching the app.

FILE BUDDY ALTERNATIVES FOR WINDOWS INSTALL

If you install the Themes add-on, you'll also be able to choose a theme. Under Settings > Appearance, you can set dark or light modes, independently of Windows, and choose whether to have a sub-menu in the right-click context menu. The preview pane (Ctrl + P) is capable of playing videos within the same window. You can also enable checkboxes more easily than in the File Explorer. If you right-click on a file, you'll see the option to 'create folder with selection' - no need to create a new folder first and then move the file into it. The open-source Files app is basically what Windows 11's File Explorer should have been: the design is consistent with Windows 11's more polished UI, it supports tabs and panes, and its settings menu is way more user-friendly.

This article will guide you in checking out some of the best of them. Luckily, many alternative Windows file managers are available for free, or at least to try. Other basic options such as checkboxes for files and restoring the previous window at startup are so inconvenient to turn on that you may have not even heard about them. The File Explorer doesn't make file tagging easy either, which can push you to create many sub-folders just to keep your files organized (and that action also requires more clicks than it should). It doesn't support dual-pane browsing either, which means that even something as simple as moving a file between two folders can make you open two Explorer windows. While Microsoft's web browser added tabs 15 years ago with Internet Explorer 7, the operating system's File Explorer has yet to implement the feature. A key component of Windows that hasn't fundamentally changed over the years is the File Explorer.

File buddy alternatives for windows