I recently got fed up with the hot garbage known as "File Explorer" that Windows ships with (note: I'm just referring to the file manager tool, not the Windows shell, which is its own rat's nest of pain). It finally irritated me enough to motivate me to go searching for a replacement. There are a few reasonably decent ones, but each one I came across had some kind of showstopper; a given replacement was either just a barebones clone of Explorer, a ripoff of the linux tool "mc" (which is a great console tool) without much of anything extra, was paid software, or a clone of some paid software.
Then I came across
Q-Dir. Holy mother of shit. It's free (not open-source, but screw it -- I'll forgive them for this one), not begware or shareware or donationware (it doesn't beg for money when you run or use it), has a metric fuckton of features, functionality and customizability, and has definitely scratched my itch for an Explorer replacement:
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Holy mother of shit, look at this thing! It defaults to a split layout with four separate folder views (hence the name "Q-Dir" or "Quad-Dir") but it supports myriad different layouts (two side-by-side, two top-to-bottom, one top panel and two split bottom panels, basically every combination you can think of). It supports rule-based filename styling (color, bold/italic/underline, etc.), supports themes, has tabs (each independent view has its own set of tabs), a tree view (one for all open panels or one per panel), all the usual "view modes" (details, small/medium/large icons, list, etc.), native zip support, etc. Every bit of it is optional -- you can strip it down to a barebones multi-panel file manager if you want. It can also be configured to step in as an Explorer replacement.
Even with a lot of those features turned on, it's very lightweight and uses minimal resources. One File Explorer window, just showing the "This PC" view listing all the system's disks and network storage, is using 65MB of memory on my machine. My open Q-Dir instance, showing four panels and seven total tabs, including several directories with thousands of entries, is using 89MB. It's very fast too (with one notable exception; see below). It handles all the usual things you'd expect from a file manager, like drag-and-drop between panels (and other applications), sane keyboard shortcuts, proper clipboard support, etc.
I've only noted a couple issues with it, but I think they're minor enough to forgive it. The biggest pain point is that it uses the native Explorer delete/recycle function to delete files and directories, and it blocks when it does so. Not a huge deal until you decide to delete a big folder with tons of stuff in it or delete a bunch of stuff all at once from a slow network drive. Then you're stuck waiting for the delete operation to finish before you can interact with Q-Dir again. You can spin up another instance of Q-Dir if you've previously configured it to allow that (I think that's actually the default behavior), but it's still annoying.
Second, it is notably slow when selecting tons of items (i.e. tens or hundreds of thousands) at once in a single panel view by some action like pressing [Ctrl]-[A] ("select all"). I made the mistake of hitting [Ctrl]-[A] on a folder with a couple hundred thousand items and ended up waiting nearly 10 minutes for Q-Dir to become responsive again. To its credit, it handles
thousands of items just fine. It only seems to have problems when you get into the 5-digit counts.
Finally, the web site is a bit Engrish, but it's still pretty easy to understand and there's an absolute boatload of documentation and FAQs.
That's it for downsides I've seen so far though. Overall I'm very happy with this thing. It's still in active development, too, so it's got that going for it.
Want to mention;
