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Dirhael:
Unicode support.-Dirhael (July 29, 2007, 05:57 AM)
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Excellent point.  Lack of unicode support is a deal killer for many.  (Not a problem for me, though.)

In some cases the core code of these file managers is probably legacy from the 90's (TC and Salamander, for instance).  In those cases, it appears to be rather difficult to support unicode.

For what it's worth, the Salamander team seems to have dropped everything else (development of tabs, quickview, more than 10 favorites, etc) to implement unicode.

Apparently TC is written in Delphi 2!  From what I gather, many if not all of the TC file list controls, trees, what have you, are custom coded from the basic Windows listbox control.  All would have to be re-written to some extent (IMHO).  For a single developer (in TC's case) that's a monumental task.  Maybe not worth it psychologically.  For many it is really difficult to get motivated to write the same application twice.

Though a large portion of these file manager's user bases do not require unicode, for global credibility it seems de rigeur.
-JohnFredC (July 29, 2007, 08:54 AM)
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I think I read on the official TC forums, that Christian planned to implement unicode support in either v7.5 or 8. I guess we'll have to wait and see, but I'm hoping for the best. Still, TC does handle unicode files to a certain degree already even if some things doesn't work, so it's not a deal-breaker. Servant Salamander however really needs to be updated, as it can't handle such files at all.

I don't have all that many files with unicode names (it's mostly music and videos that are affected, so maybe somewhere between 500-1000 at any given time on my local drives), but I still need a file manager to be able to actually manage all of my files, not just a selected few. Thankfully, Dopus handles everything I could ever wish for and then some, but I still would like to see the final batch of the AAA file managers catch up.

zridling:
Wow, let's re-view XYplorer. Dirhael correctly identifies XYplorer's current weakness — unicode renaming, which the dev has planned for the future. However:

* It's had breadcrumbs through the last two versions; CTRL+H provides a Hotlist to your History interface;

* XYplorer's layout management is virtually unlimited;

* Selecting plugins and view>file types is one key away — F9;

* XYplorer's visual filters (been there for a long, long time) easily subordinate folder tree visibility to the active folder tab;

* I've never, ever had XYplorer crash on me (I must be doing something wrong).
Don't forget little things like customizable keyboard shortcuts (wait, that's a biggie with me), on-the-fly font sizing (CTRL+mousewheel), and XYplorer includes a large suite of useful commands added to the standard file context menu, including Copy To, Move To, Copy Filename with Path, Copy File Properties, Copy Large/Small Icon, Multi-file Rename (optionally using Regular Expressions). Not perfect, but being small, fast, powerful, and RAM-friendly goes a long way for me.

Dirhael:
Absolutely zridling, Xyplorer is a really nice tool, and when it gets updated with unicode support it'll be even better. I don't think it'll be my primary tool anytime soon, but as it comes with a fantastic life-time license it doesn't really matter.

I do know of a sure fool-proof way to make it crash though, and it has done it since I first tried Xyplorer in the 5.x versions. What you need is a lot of gifs (I have a folder with around 1000 small ones, mainly tiles I use in various projects). If you have that, just try to let it generate thumbnails for them all. It always crashes. Still, that's highly unlikely to be a problem for most people, if anyone at all, but just thought I'd let you know if you want to try crashing it ;)

Lashiec:
Yeah, since Zaine announced XYplorer version 6 on his blog, I started to think in setting up a divorce demand from xplorer², and engaging with XYplorer. A visit to its website didn't do any good, and this once happy relationship is in a turmoil right now. I might start up saving for a XYplorer license, instead of the xplorer² one I intended.

;D

urlwolf:
I have abandoned dopus due to outrageous update fees and have happily moved to TC. TC has colors for filetypes and lots of other small features that make me think it's vastly superior to dopus _for me_.

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