Funny thing, I voted after I posted and instinctively chose X2 coz as of now that's what I'm using over 95% of the time. It immediately struck me that I should have voted for 'multiple managers'.
Sorry Lanux, I now feel like the guy who's shaking hands with a president he voted against.
I've always had Salamander around but it's not something I want to use on a day to day basis. I really doubt it has the power (flexibility wise) of X2 and I do want a tree view at most times. Things like scrap panes, highly configurable color coding (based on name, file property, any meta tag, even text contained within a file (though I guess that would be a major strain on resources) or a combination of any of the above...
It's generally very light on resources (the exe is perhaps the tiniest in this category and I've never has resource issues with it despite using it extensively), easily configurable layout - I make new layouts on the fly for different tasks and it doesn't feel like a burden, neat things like 'extracting subfolders' or flattening files, selectively showing/hiding/selecting files/folders based on simple/advanced criteria, multiple tabs in addition to panes, for those rare occasions one wants more than two folders open simultaneously... it has a LOT of features I find genuinely useful and it matches my philosophy in trying mainly to be a file manager and staying focused about its main purpose. I have custom tools for things like encryption. compression, FTP, file comparison, advanced renaming - I don't want a file manager that's going to try and take away these carefully picked out specialists. X2 offers most of these things on a very basic level which suits me just fine, I may need to quickly compare folders or rename a bunch of files with a numeric counter but when it comes to advanced jobs I like to have something that's devoted to that task. Would any other file manager, for instance, compare as well as Beyond Compare or rename as easily and intuitively as ReNamer or encrypt/decrypt as blazingly fast as Cryptext or as securely as PGP? If the answer to any/all the above is yes, then please explain would I want all this functionality constantly loaded in something that's running all the time? Unnecessary overhead. It's hard not to want X2 for use on an everyday basis when your philosophy matches mine.
I completely agree with Grorgy when he says it has problems that are blamed on other apps, rather than being 'handled'. That's my biggest regret regarding this app, it's almost perfect and from what one hears there's not too much being done to take it to its full potential. It doesn't come across as polished or sturdy as DOpus, for example. Its rendering large folders with thumbnails, is choppy at best. X2 is so powerful already, I think a great way for the developer to go would be just to look at the existing code and root out these little flaws & inefficiencies rather than worry about things like enhancing a relatively weak mass rename function. I'm certain most X2 fans would welcome this direction and it would go a long way in increasing his sales too, most people (including myself) are perfectionists when it comes to the software they run. You instinctively want to dump something that acts quirky - I've considered doing that several times, always going back - it's like a beautiful woman with a few obvious flaws, you can't help but go back.
Here's a question for DOpus users - is there any way to manage/customize the right-click context menu within DO? - to, for instance, put items like cut/copy/paste into an 'Edit' submenu? I use a 3rd party app to manage my context menu and with DOpus (which doesn't seem to support that app) the context menu occupies the full height of my screen. If I could find a way to shorten the menu I'd seriously consider DOpus coz I'm pretty certain it does all the little tricks X2 does & then some.
