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What's your preferred File Manager

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sri:
kalos: I thought all find managers like x2, xy, DO are just like shells on top of windows explorer? If am not mistaken, they will stop working if windows explorer is removed from the system.

Fedorov:
If Explorer crashes you normally have to reboot your PC, if Total Commander crashes (very very rarely) you just kill the process and load it again.

I recently licensed Total Commander on 3 work colleagues PCs - I suggest to people to force themselves to use it for 2 weeks and then try going back to Explorer, they can't go back to Explorer and everyone loves Total Commander once they get used to the keyboard shortcuts, dual-pane etc... :)

SirSmiley:
the problem is that we dont need just to add features to the feature-lacking windows explorer, but we need to totaly REPLACE the windows explorer, because its buggy, system resources consuming and slow
-kalos (October 16, 2007, 03:40 PM)
--- End quote ---

Have to disagree with the System Resources comment. Most file manager's I've tried are not always easier on resources. As for buggy it's a matter of opinion. I've never had any issues with the standard out-of-the-box Win Explorer. Most problems/crashes have been a result of poorly coded plugins, etc.
 
If Explorer crashes you normally have to reboot your PC
-Fedorov (October 17, 2007, 03:58 AM)
--- End quote ---

Maybe for older Windows OS' but, not with XP.

mitzevo:
Windows explorer (with out any add-ons, such as qt*, etc.) on XP (or < XP) is no good. Not even a match to any of the good file managers (such as the ones being constantly talked about). But with an add-on such as the qttabbar, it really makes a difference (in a good way).

and the advantage and extras gained from said third party tools doesnt really justify the added expense or reconfiguration I have to go through
--- End quote ---
  :down: It doesn't justify 30mins - 1 hour of your life to configure/learn about a new program that could potentially/exponentially increase your productivity (such as managing files)? C'mon  ;D

iphigenie:
It doesn't justify 30mins - 1 hour of your life to configure/learn about a new program that could potentially/exponentially increase your productivity (such as managing files)? C'mon  ;D
-mitzevo (October 17, 2007, 11:34 AM)
--- End quote ---

It really depends how much time you spend doing complex file manipulations where said work could make a difference... and how likely am I to indentify which ones will help me...

Yes, somewhere in the options and features of any of these other tools there are probably 1 or 2 functions, or maybe 10! that if I read about them and thought about them in the right way, would save me 30 minutes at some point in the next year. Or maybe 4 hours one day... Problem is, I have to wade through 100 features that won't help me, and by the time I read about the option that would help me, I might not even recognise its potential.

I have a zillion productivity enhancements which all have the potential to simplify and automate some tasks, but the time it takes to figure out which bits really could help me in stuff that I actually do...  I had autohotkey installed for a while and did not do anything with it. I have wirekeys and use about 15% of the features, if that. Same goes for some of the stardock enhancements and the filemanager I own etc.

So yes there are treasure features in the stuff I have that if I only learned about it I might use. But there are several traps in there:

Trap 1: Spending more time reading about a task than it takes doing it. I could spend hours reading feature lists and manuals of utilities to learn things that could come in handy one day. And indeed since I am a bit of a software junkie, sometimes I have done just that. I have lwa collections of annotated webpages to prove it...

Trap 2: Inventing new tasks just because the tool can do it. And sometimes we fall in the trap of embarking on a task which we didnt really need to do and could have happily continued without doing (eg: rearrange and tag hundreds of files one didnt really have a problem managing the boring old way), just cause the tool can do it.

Trap 3: feature envy

So nowadays I tend to go at it the other way around, I wait until there is something that turns out to be a "faff" to do with the tools I own and then I
1) skim through the docs of the stuff I own to see if I might spot a function or option that can help
2) skim through my list of past software notes to see if I spot something there
3) then i go and search the web, starting here and at a few choice sites

Especially with file management - I spend maybe 2-3 hours on such tasks during a week, and most of them are 4 minute jobbies. Even if I could shave 1 minute by having some super clever keyboard system, how long would it take me to come up with the right one?

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