The basic requirements for a file managing utility are pretty much well, ehh... basic: just give me something to comfortably view and transfer files. There are of course a lot of nice additional features: packing/unpacking, good search capabilities, convenient selecting, etc., but for start just give me something I can work with.
Back to my first sentence: managing files should be basic, and well in my humble opinion, not that complicated. So how come Microsoft still have the crippled Windows Explorer?!
Really, unless I'm missing some patent the whole world has I don't understand how come Explorer doesn't implement the most basic feature even the old Norton Commander had - two panes with which you can copy files between locations or easily see the disk's information. Without this so basic ability I don't know if there's really a need to mention other drawbacks (however, I will) like:
- The XP's\2003 (didn't test it on Windows 7 because I kinda lost hope) totally not working searching within documents feature. I mean, OK let the search be slow, inefficient, whatever, but how can it miss a simple phrase in a .txt file?
- How do I select all *.foo files in a folder? I'd be very happy to hear a simple answer to that as I really don't know how this is done, and it seems such a basic task...
- And if it's even possible Windows7\2008 interface is even less user(\me) friendly, didn't really understand what they were trying to do.
- Well, you got the point by now.
As for me, I've been working with FAR Manager for many years, but today my weapon of choice is Total Commander, obviously it's not perfect but it does the job and does it good. One of many features it has (and Explorer doesn't) is the tabbed interface, I won't say it's genius because I think it's simply a trivial requirement from something that wasn't written 5 years ago.
The thing that most amazes me is that most people still use the old good(?) Explorer, some maybe I'm just hard to please...
