@Enternal
I do not expect anyone to agree with me, people have different tastes and different requirements for file managers. According to
Wikipedia the first version of
XYplorer was released on 1999.12.05 and for 17 years of development common features like FTP and synchronization were never implemented, for me this is shocking.
@Stoik
I have licenses for four commercial file managers (in alphabetical order)-
Directory Opus (I have the
Light version, which is very "light" in features and therefore almost useless to me),
System Navigator (ugly, poor, abandoned),
oMega Commander (I acquired a license via a recent
giveaway),
XYplorer. I like none of them very much.
I have also tested three commercial file managers (in alphabetical order)-
SpeedCommander (it comes in two versions-
Standard & Pro),
Total Commander,
xplorer (it also comes in two editions-
professional & ultimate). I like
SpeedCommander best (as far as I can remember it offered portable installation)- it provides almost all the features I would need in a file manager (archiving, burning, FTP, cloud services, synchronization, junctions, disk image files handling, etc) but for me the themes (Microsoft Office, Visual Studio, etc) are ugly or at least unattractive and as far as I know the developer does not offer lifetime licenses.
Total Commander looks nice and is flexible and powerful but customizing it is not always very easy, for example for me customizing the tool-bar was painful compared to
Multi Commander. I don't like
xplorer at all, neither the looks (although the ribbon can be disabled) nor the usage- for me this manager is neither intuitive nor handy. Also I have problems installing it.
I have never tested the following commercial file managers (in alphabetical order)-
AB Commander,
Altap Salamander,
Blue Explorer,
EF Commander,
Frigate (many years ago I think I used ot for a while on someone else's machine and I was impressed but this manager has been abandoned long time ago),
Magellan Explorer,
V,
WinNc,
XplorPlus.
I have tested and used these free file managers (in alphabetical order)-
A43 (a humble manager with some nice features, superseded by
A56),
Double Commander (x64 version available, permanent Beta, cross-platform, in development),
FileVoyager (no x64 version, very promising, in development),
FreeCommander (the x64 version is available to donors only, for me version
2009.02b is more feature-rich and less buggy than the current version),
Just Manager (Alpha, light, tiny, nice-looking, easy to use but unfirtunately- abandoned),
muCommander (cross-platform, requires Java, slow development),
Multi Commander (x64 version, powerful, customizable, in development),
NexusFile (cute-looking but disappointng and abandoned),
Nomad.NET (.NET),
Q-Dir (x64 version, rather a directory browser than an actual file manager, sometimes it crashes on my system),
Tablacus Explorer (x64 version, like
Q-Dir- more a directory browser, not very easy to customize, lots of add-ons, in development),
trolCommander (
muCommander fork, requires Java, in development),
Unreal Commander (the current stable version is x32 only while the current Beta has both x32 and x64 builds, some features (like FTP) are available to donors only, very ugly interface),
wxCommander (free for non-professional/non-commercial home use, abandoned).
For quite some time my favourite among the free file managers was
Multi Commander but because of this:
message, which seems that cannot be disabled although I have disabled update check,
Multi Commander forced me to dump it (I have my reasons to be unwilling to update to the latest versions).
So no file manager, neither commercial nor free, is really dear to me- all have their virtues and flaws so I have no real favourite. I mostly use
Q-Dir because I cannot do without its four panes and I need scores of tabs because I do lots of tests and I need permanent access to many directories. For different tasks (FTP, archiving, burning, renaming, searching, synchronizing, viewing, etc) I use dedicated tools- I don't think that a single program can cope with all these tasks well, or at least better than the dedicated tools I use. So,
Q-Dir as a browser is convenient to me for fast access to folders but it is not a real file manager for sure.
By mistake I closed my browser just before publishing this post and I had to re-write it by memory from scratch, most likely I have forgotten some of the things I wrote initially.