A few cool things I can do with X². Technically all of this should be more than possible with Explorer addons, the point is - are there addons existing to perform these little "tricks" for lack of a better word and if there are - how much slower will Explorer get?
First off, just browsing through the Windows system folder with Explorer and then with a replacement should give you a good idea of how unnecessarily slow Explorer is.
With X² I can:
- press the + key, type in abc and press enter and the pane is immediately filtered for files and folders that match the *abc* wildcard pattern
- press Alt++ (Alt and +) and specify text, every file and folder matching that wildcard is immediately selected.
- press * and the selection is immediately inverted
- Alt+J - only files are visible now, another shortcut to make just folders visible
- Alt+Enter on a folder opens it in the opposite pane
- Color code files based on all kinds of criteria
- save and restore a complex selection (how many times have you lost a complicated selection in explorer thanks to a single careless mouse click?)
- Sticky select: Only clicking a file will mark it selected/unselected, random clicks elsewhere in the window will have no effect on selection
- make a selection of files from several locations and conduct operations on them in one go.
- save a selection to _disk_
"Flatten" folders: recurse and list just the files within every subfolder
Recreate a folder structure (without files) in another location with simple drag and drop
Copy only selected files to another location with their parent folder structure intact
Say I want to copy the same file to 300 folders that lie in a complex subfolder system. Simple - enumerate folders, multi paste. How much time would this take one in Explorer? More importantly, how much would one age doing it?
Besides most of the added functionality availabe for explorer is not via toolbar apps only designed for explorer but via shell context items and these are supported 100% by X².
I know some of this is not everyday-use functionality, but put it all together in one (lightweight!) package, get the right external shell context functionality, get somewhat familiar with the X² shortcuts (they can all be remapped to suit you) and you'll start feeling a real paradigm shift.
BTW, I've just described a small part of what X² can do, the thing doesn't have a 400 page manual for nothing. But don't let that put you off coz you can do as little or as much with it as you like.
