1. Directory Opus
- By far the best file manager available, and well worth the asking price. Excellent support & the application just feels "right." It handles most of my image-management-, S/FTP- & global hotkey-needs in addition to the excellent file handling. The search functions are among the best I've ever seen, rivaling even most of the dedicated search apps. Probably the worlds most customizable application, something that just adds to the value. My only issue with it is that the license is a bit restrictive, but that's not really related to the program itself.

2. [url=http://www.ghisler.com/[/url]Total Commander[/url]
- The second best file manager, that complements Dopus well with its large collection of file-system plugins. My only real problem with it is not the application itself, but rather the fact that it's a pain in the read-end to actually buy/register it. Buying applications online should never be as hard as this, ever! Also, the program itself could use some more options to configure its core functions, as there is no reason to force me to press "yes, I'm sure for the 1000th damn time that I want to delete this folder, even if there's a system file in it!" Other than those issues, I mostly love it :)

3. Find And Run Robot.
- I have barely touched the start-menu since I installed this. It's fast, easy to use & in general makes my life easier. I like that!

4. Zoom Player WMV Professional
Watching videos without Zoom Player is a pain. While it's not for everyone, I absolutely love the filter-management features, and the full-screen navigators in the latest 5 betas are excellent. Really makes it easier to watch videos from the PC on the old 'tube'. The only thing it needs to be perfect is internal subtitle parsing so that you could have re-synced them using hotkeys, instead of having to open the Directvobsub interface.

5. Foobar 2000
- After discovering Foobar 2k, all other audio-players got uninstalled. There's no need for anything else when you already have the perfect player right here. It's fast, has excellent unicode handling (which is more than you can say for WMP & WinAMP :-\), handles any format I throw at it, it's playlist-centric & I can customize it to do just about anything.

6. True Launch Bar
- Quick-launch toolbars the way it should be done. The fact that it supports plugins only makes it better, as today I wouldn't dream of not having a media toolbar for controlling my audio player of choice.

7. Taskbar Shuffle
- Why this function never was implemented in Windows is a mystery, but who really cares when there's excellent freeware applications that makes re-ordering taskbar items as easy as this?

8. Opera
- This is exactly how a browser should be made. About as close to perfect as such an application can be.

9. Ad Muncher
- The best ad-filtering utility available. Really, it's brilliant. Just looking at the stats since my last OS installation makes me smile :)

Ad Muncher Usage Statistics for v4.7 Build 27105/1416
Adverts removed by Ad Muncher:  46,690
Approximate bandwidth saved:    364 MB
Counter started:                oktober 28, 2006

10. Faststone Image Viewer
- I think I've tried close to all available image browsers, but this is what use when I have to do more with the image than Dopus can take care of. My favourite feature is probably the superb wallpaper functions and the full-screen browser/editing functions. If not for the fact that it uses one of those terrible skinned interfaces (it's really bad, without any option to use the Windows default), I'd give it a close-to-perfect score.

Sounds very fair to me actually :) By the way, seeing as you're here now, what about a feature like the one I mention in this post?

-Dirhael (October 30, 2006, 04:07 AM)

I'm not sure what exactly are you calling "a feature". Please explain your task, the desired way of its achievement, and what do you miss in the current version of Actual Window Manager. Thanks. (BTW, you may post a feature request at our forum; we consider all the requests and implement many of them.)

-Actual Tools (November 02, 2006, 04:53 AM)

Sorry, I should have explained it a bit better.. To better explain, consider the following scenario: I'm using an application like, let's say, Notepad++. The window captioning in this case is "Notepad++ - C:\path\to\open\file.txt" . Now, as this application let's you open several files in the same window (MDI), the window captioning will change depending on which "tab" you have open, yet the "Notepad++ -" always remains. Renaming the window with Actual Window Manager would in this case not be very useful seeing as if I renamed it to "C:\path\to\open\file.txt" and changed to a tab with a file named e.g. "anotherfile.txt", the window title would still say "C:\path\to\open\file.txt". This wouldn't really be of much use, as all it would do is to make things even more confusing.
This all leads me to the feature request; the option to strip out just parts of a window captioning, either by specifying a literate string to remove, or even better, using a regular expression. In my example above, all I would want to remove is the "Notepad++ -" part, but let the rest of the captioning change as usual.

Hope that explains it a bit better :)

Thanks for posting the solution!  One of these days I'll learn AutoHotKey....

-tim254 (October 28, 2006, 04:46 PM)

It's not really that hard to get started with, but I think it'll be a long time until I fully understand it all. It's just one of those applications that once it's installed, you can't really imagine how you ever managed to live without it. I originally installed it as I have a Swedish keyboard, and while I really like it, I needed to have the Norwegian versions of the letters ÄÖ (ÆØ) without having to change the layout itself. That part was very easy to do, but I almost forgot I even had it installed until I needed to get this thing done :)