Looks great. I ran a test browsing a folder of pdfs but it does not look like File Pilot likes previwing pdfs with Acrobat set as default pdf viewer; no preview/thumbnail shown for pdfs.
being able to hold down Ctrl-T, and just have it open tabs at the speed of the typematic rate is such a joy. it is really honestly disgusting (and I don't use that word lightly) how long it takes for explorer.exe to open a tab, open a context menu, or (god forbid!) open a window.
genuine breath of fresh air to have a file explorer that isn't hot garbage.
Just wow. Seeing the demo, I just hope Microsoft can do somthing like that with current Explorer app. It's good now but still can improve more with something like File Pilot
Explorer is slow because it's extensible. All the thumbnails and extra stuff in the context menu is what slows it down. There's some pathological cases like "opening a folder with an MP3 file in" which puts it into scanning all the files for ID3 tags.
Fpilot is a great example of how it's possible to make something MUCH faster by limiting the feature set.
(also some of the NTFS APIs are horribly slow for extended information)
I don't know if Windows Explorer has regressed since Vista, but back then I remember it doing everything I wanted and more, down to viewing and editing MP3 and JPG metadata in some panel, filtering, grouping, smart searches, etc.
What else do you need from it?
I don't know the state now because I've since switched to macOS, which has Finder, an absolute toy in comparison (other than QuickLook and Column View)
Not really, linux doesn't really have a good file manager. Dolphin probably gets you closest. I'd like to scratch the itch, but I don't have time to start such a project at the moment.
Really, dolphin is best? Using Dolphin on Nobara right now, and the pinned items in the left pane are not there in the systems "file open" dialog, the dialog does not even have breadcrumbs(!!). Or am I holding it wrong?
You have the option of what applications will show the pin. Right click on an item and you can choose if this is global or app-specific (in this case dolphin, but you can indeed pin per app!).
The file open dialog is likely the "portal", which works securely across sandboxed applications. Every Linux does have a portal implementation.
In KDE this portal has quite some features, but it could be that some are not available, possibly spec-related or security concern. You can look in the settings though.
EDIT: pinned items are available in the desktop-portal. I have not looked into breadcrumbs, but I like the location bar to be editable straight away anyways.
tl;dr There's a ‘filename’ version and a ‘URL’ version of the dialog. Some things are incorrectly missing from the ‘filename’ version because they're internally implemented using URLs.
I ended up with ForkLift after much trial and error. Commander One was nice. Double Commander is also great but not "native" on Mac. Path Finder is super powerful but has a rep for being overcomplicated and also crashy, but I can't personally vouch because it wasn't quite what I was looking for anyway.
Forklift is the one I settled on as well. I had the experience you describe with Path Finder before and finally I gave up.
Forklift has a couple of things that annoy me daily though. Often I will have to refresh a pane to see a file I know has recently been added. Eg in downloads. I may even have navigated to downloads after the download finished and it's still not visible until I refresh.
The other is that it doesn't reuse existing tabs if I "reveal in finder" or whatever, so after a while there's a million tabs open, most pointing to the same directory.
What is the deal with MacOS file dialogs? A couple days ago I was trying to open a project in Cursor, and I click on "home" and my name, and then it has the directories grouped by year created. So I type in the search box, but it's now searching some other context, like the whole system or something? I don't even have tons of files/directories in my home directory "ls | wc -l" gives 36.
It's like they designed it while watching High Fidelity: "I sorted my albums autobiographically. So if I'm looking for <this album> I have to remember that it's under albums I bought for a girl but ended up not giving to her." "That sounds like a great idea!"
If you start searching, I think it defaults to scope "This Mac". That's probably right for most cases. If you want to open a Word doc named Fnord, you'd kind of hope Finder would... find it... wherever it was. But you can also click next to "This Mac" to switch it the context of the directory you're in.
Also, cmd-shift-G (the Finder shortcut for "Go to Folder...") will let you start typing a path.
Sounds like it was sorted by “most recent” (not the column, but the view mode).
That said the Open dialog is a sad sack stand in for even the flawed Finder. 20 year Mac user here: I developed the muscle memory to just have a Finder window open to the file I want so I can drag and drop from that into the Open dialog.
> then it has the directories grouped by year created
That's a setting you set.
Right click on empty space > uncheck "Use groups"
Or in that context menu, select "Show View Options" and customize it to your liking. My liking is "Group by kind" (folders to the top) then "Sort by name"
Thanks everyone, these pointers were really helpful. At one time I think I set it to "most recent" and forgot about it, since I'm not using the finder a whole lot. I hadn't even thought about going into settings, so I went there and did some tweaks, including defaulting to searching within folder by default, and changing some locations that it defaults to, which I think will really help.
It’s possible to get pretty close. For example, Forklift’s instructions (go to https://binarynights.com/manual, search for “Default File Viewer”) nearly replaces it, except you still have a Finder icon in the dock.
It does seem like there are more well made, premium apps on Mac. I’ve always been jealous. Eventually a clone is made that supports Windows, but it always seems a bit worse.
On macOS my daily driver is Nimble Commander (https://magnumbytes.com/). Super fast, powerful and inspired by Total Commander. It used to be paid but now is free and open source so give it a try. It deserves to be better known.
The top of the homepage says File Pilot was made from scratch (so I'd expect inherently less technical debt than something that's been around since the 90's). Comparing its screenshots to Directory Opus, it looks less cluttered, or at least slightly different. The interface looks like it adheres to the Windows 11 design style a little more, versus Directory Opus's screenshots looking like Windows 8-10.
If I used Windows regularly, I'd probably appreciate having another option, just as I appreciate (and even take for granted) the ability to switch between various options on Linux.
On the other hand, 35 years of cruft also represents 35 years of accumulated knowledge about what people want from a file manager. So one should not dismiss Directory Opus based upon a few screenshots.
Fresh blood is certainly a good thing though. I am just arguing that we should not dismiss something based upon its age or cosmetics.
(Directory Opus is one of the few things that I miss while using Linux.)
Is this cross platform or is it targeted at a particular filesystem? I skimmed the site but couldn't find any info. The FAQ is full of pricing minutiae but nothing about what platforms are supported?
It will come to other OSes in time. The Windows platform layer is decoupled from everything else, such as rendering and UI, so I only need to write platform-specific code for other OSes.
Wow, after so many useless bloated Electron based applications over the years, this is like a breath of fresh air. This is so fast, lightweight, portable, and uses only 17 MB of memory with XL icons of over 10k photos. Very impressive. If only more developers would quit their laziness and make such software again.
Totally agree! Let's make a real joy such like this one. I feel a great sense of satisfaction and excitement watching the File Pilot development process.
It looks like WPF but isn't. Sibling comment suggests sui generis, which explains the tiny size and lack of dependencies. This does make it blindingly fast but makes the keymappings different from what you'd normally expect. Haven't tested annoying cases e.g. two monitors with different DPI.
Yeah and its $40 per year it seems. While its good that you can continue using your version after that it does seem just a little much. I'm not sure I even want to try it now because I don't want to like it and then decide I can't afford it. I'm not against yearly license cost at all, I think that it can be hard for software companies to make something good without it. But for a new software it seems just a tad high. And I guess it will seem even more depending on where you live.
It's not "per year". It's your good old conventinal pricing, in disguise.
You buy Xyz 2002, you get to keep Xyz 2002 and get some updates. When new and shiny Xyz 2004 comes out, you look at the spec and decide if new features worth the upgrade cost.
Same here, except improvements are gradual and not packaged into yearly releases.
Especially working in cloud environments is so cumbersome... Sync to the cloud is great, but we lost these kind of tools that just make life so much easier when handling many files and such
I’m not sure if this is really the right place to ask, but it’s close enough so I’ll ask anyway - why are there no apparent file explorers that allow simultaneous “multi depth” viewing? For example, if Folder A contains only Subfolders B and C which are both empty, why are there no explorers that show eg 2 boxes called ‘B’ and ‘C’ inside A’s icon/view? If a directly has dozens of empty folders, and 2 subfolders have 1 file each, and another subfolder has 20 files and takes 99% of space, why is there no intuitive way to quickly find the large folder?
The closest is probably how windows shows previews on desktop but that is only one level deep, if there are empty subfolders it doesn’t help.
Id imagine someone at Plan9 or WebOS or BeOS or some archaic software/OS developer had surely thought of this and made something. Yet all “top” windows file explorers are completely “flat” and don’t show any depth.
It's not a file explorer so not exactly what you're looking for, but WizTree is good for finding out which folder contains the large files. It's like WinDirStat but much faster.
Thanks, I’m familiar with WizTree but to the best of knowledge it’s meant more to find what’s taking space, rather than navigating between folders. I’m not sure how practical it would be as a replacement of file explorer, for example I think it defaults to mapping out the whole drive (rather than a specific folder). But thanks anyway for the suggestion!
if you start from File Explorer Navigation Pane and used the default WizTree install then every folder (in File Explorer) should have a right click context menu item that launches Wiztree for just the folder subtree.
if you start from command.com or Powershell then you can pass a subdirectory path as an argument (with a switchy? I don't recall ATM) or make a shortcut comman to launch WizTree for a subfolder.
Sounds interesting, I use to use a tool that showed a drives or folders content by file size. Larger files being larger boxes.
It definitely seems useful to have a view where folders are simply boxes with ---names--- in their top border. A folder could also be a simple outline with its name in front of the file names.
There is no software, I just make a drawing to see what I'm thinking. Ideas fail surprisingly often in the process. For example, here the boxes somewhat conflict with lining up the text and the line spacing. Some background color (rather than outlines) could better visualize the nesting and use less space. I think a folder that contains only one file should look almost exactly like the file was in the parent folder.
If the folder name is long it should probably fail back on the normal tree view rather than putting it in front of the files in the box. But then you get a mix of solutions which is undesirable.
I'm afraid people are to used to the traditional tree view. It is a surprisingly good solution now that I've bothered to think about it.
Folders should probably just have a value in the size column and the screens are large enough to have a column for the number of files. (the pilot does F:21 S:123) Empty folder and file font colors can be slightly translucent.
Directory Opus can also calculate & display the sizes of folders including all child content. (The calculation is nearly instant if Everything integration is enabled.)
I still use and can recommend Sequoia (or SequoiaView?) program from early 2000s to map all directories by size. VERY useful to know what to clean.
As for exlorer... The only drawback to your request is, obviously, the need for recursive FS scan, which is expensive. That is why it is not in-built in default file explorer functionality. But XnView, for example, optionally shows brief content of directories (e.g. 4 mini-thumbs over a directory icon).
Files looks great but it has performance issues and occasional crashes when I tried it out a few months ago. When going into subfolders, there is a very noticeable subsecond lag which I don’t get from native Explorer. For all complaints of lack of features that Windows File Explorer gets, it’s still a very respectable native GUI app for being Windows’ most used program!
It's usable most of the time until it isn't. Far to often I wonder what they were thinking making things. Say, where is the recycle bin? If I could switch to the windows 95 explorer I would do it immediately.
yeah honestly files was such a disappointment for me. Modern i5 from 2 years ago desktop system on windows 11 and it would crash every 2-3 days just browsing with at most <15 tabs open.
Was it coded in electron? What's filepilot made in?
Does it integrate with Everything allowing for instant search results for any file anywhere? Plans to have extensions?
A detailed comparison with Directory Opus would be welcome
That's exactly what I've been asking myself and I wish I could. I index our huge, nested network drives every night with Everything and can search & find within seconds.
It does not integrate with Everything. It's already blazingly fast with the regular WinAPI for indexing. However, MFT indexing (which Everything uses) will be added as built-in support in the near future. It will be an opt-in option for users.
There are a couple of reasons why I didn't want to make MFT the default.
a) It requires admin access.
b) It's NTFS specific, which means you need to write different logic for other file systems anyway.
c) It's not officially documented or supported by Microsoft. It was reverse-engineered.
There is "blazingly fast" where you also have to only include SSDs, still see your root drive taking seconds to populate data for, and still requiring admin for the whole app with those ugly underlines otherwise..
And then there is literally instant, for literally everything, while the app itself is in normal mode and thus preserves the non-admin benefits.
a) Not for the app, only for Everything
b) Those other file systems could also be indexed by Everything (though via a slower mechanism). Also given the primacy of NTFS, I'd definitely trade the ability to have folder sizes for drives I rarely use for the instant calculations on drives I use all the time
c) Good. Waiting for MS docs could mean a few more decades of wasted potential
If there's a portable version of this I can run on my work computer, I will! (stand-alone version, it's so fast!)
The Windows built-in File Explorer is godawfully slow. Like, slower than I remember it being in the late 90's. Motivation-sappingly slow. But I think it's because my work computer has it's inescapable synchronisation to OneDrive, and so every folder and every file it has to scan for a thumbnail or whatever, waits for it's data from OneDrive like a happy little idiot.
Funnily enough, navigating a remote directory on my NAS from my home Linux desktop is blazingly fast as if the files are local.
Windows or the Corporate Environment, or the combination of the two, is creating so much overhead that it feels like going back in time 25+ years.
Also company computer: Built-in file explorer sometimes takes 3 seconds to display a thumbnail for a 10KB png I saved to a folder from my editor. I just don't get it. We also have OneDrive. Don't shoot the messenger alright but it really makes me want to punch the monitor.
People are gushing about a file explorer, what?
Looks like there is a plan to force user's to pay for a subscription to there own local files.
My $90 wallmart phone and hinky fdroid software is faster than than what is bieng described on current windopes editions.
what happened? since my last windoze experience?
linux on the laptop is ok, ancient laptop, cheap phone, that play nice with each other, random free sofware, does what it says on the label and more.
Obviously my set up is not goung to work in a professional business environment, but then for professional users, hunting around for fixes to inadequate OS features, should be a thing of the past.
tedious and somewhat embarassing that things are so horrible, now, still, again
If anyone doesn't know, Windows PowerToys has some of these features built in, like bulk renaming. I particularly like their FancyZones feature, although that's unrelated to the file explorer.
230 comments
[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 185 ms ] threadThe Opera web browser used to do this before the switch to Chromium. I don’t know that any modern browser has this performance capability.
Excellent work, OP. Complements to the chef.
[1] https://filepilot.handmade.network
They can start by making explorer startup in less than 5 seconds. Let's face it, Microsoft devs don't care about performance and probably never will.
Fpilot is a great example of how it's possible to make something MUCH faster by limiting the feature set.
(also some of the NTFS APIs are horribly slow for extended information)
Why would this parallel background task have any impact on Explorer's startup time or UI responsiveness?
Are you able to clarify what it does better now than it did 10, 15, 20 years ago?
What else do you need from it?
I don't know the state now because I've since switched to macOS, which has Finder, an absolute toy in comparison (other than QuickLook and Column View)
The file open dialog is likely the "portal", which works securely across sandboxed applications. Every Linux does have a portal implementation.
In KDE this portal has quite some features, but it could be that some are not available, possibly spec-related or security concern. You can look in the settings though.
EDIT: pinned items are available in the desktop-portal. I have not looked into breadcrumbs, but I like the location bar to be editable straight away anyways.
tl;dr There's a ‘filename’ version and a ‘URL’ version of the dialog. Some things are incorrectly missing from the ‘filename’ version because they're internally implemented using URLs.
Forklift has a couple of things that annoy me daily though. Often I will have to refresh a pane to see a file I know has recently been added. Eg in downloads. I may even have navigated to downloads after the download finished and it's still not visible until I refresh.
The other is that it doesn't reuse existing tabs if I "reveal in finder" or whatever, so after a while there's a million tabs open, most pointing to the same directory.
It's like they designed it while watching High Fidelity: "I sorted my albums autobiographically. So if I'm looking for <this album> I have to remember that it's under albums I bought for a girl but ended up not giving to her." "That sounds like a great idea!"
Also, cmd-shift-G (the Finder shortcut for "Go to Folder...") will let you start typing a path.
Correct, and it's the first setting I change.
Finder > Settings > Advanced > When performing a search: "Search the Current Folder"
That said the Open dialog is a sad sack stand in for even the flawed Finder. 20 year Mac user here: I developed the muscle memory to just have a Finder window open to the file I want so I can drag and drop from that into the Open dialog.
That's a setting you set.
Right click on empty space > uncheck "Use groups"
Or in that context menu, select "Show View Options" and customize it to your liking. My liking is "Group by kind" (folders to the top) then "Sort by name"
There is not an optional "set this as default" like browsers. Something we should really push Apple to do. Finder is trash.
If I used Windows regularly, I'd probably appreciate having another option, just as I appreciate (and even take for granted) the ability to switch between various options on Linux.
Fresh blood is certainly a good thing though. I am just arguing that we should not dismiss something based upon its age or cosmetics.
(Directory Opus is one of the few things that I miss while using Linux.)
But speaking of technical debts, I couldn't open a UNC path ( \\nas\share\ ). Opening a network share mounted to a drive letter worked fine though.
Direct network access (and better integration with NAS) will be added in the near future.
Linux basically has a pile of dogpoo and now with wayland still blocking the ability to have dockable windows, good luck. Lol
"It's written in C and has custom OpenGL renderer."
https://filepilot.handmade.network/
edit: report of poor CJK support https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43100494 ; Windows file system encoding is annoying because it's UTF-16.
I mean, I don't even know what you use to write "windows" applications anymore.
But are the stock frameworks that slow to justify rewriting the toolkit? I am under the impression that writing GUI toolkits was Hard.
Are there plans to make this cross platform?
Agree about the MS offerings. That's why I use cross-platform frameworks (wx, qt) even for the Win-only apps.
Only thing I'd love is to be able to go bigger on the preview thumbnails. It's limited itself to the Windows sizes.
I am probably repeating your comment in my sleep, word for word.
You buy Xyz 2002, you get to keep Xyz 2002 and get some updates. When new and shiny Xyz 2004 comes out, you look at the spec and decide if new features worth the upgrade cost.
Same here, except improvements are gradual and not packaged into yearly releases.
At least the beta is still free now. $50 which is the default price, is too much.
Good software costs money.
The closest is probably how windows shows previews on desktop but that is only one level deep, if there are empty subfolders it doesn’t help.
Id imagine someone at Plan9 or WebOS or BeOS or some archaic software/OS developer had surely thought of this and made something. Yet all “top” windows file explorers are completely “flat” and don’t show any depth.
if you start from File Explorer Navigation Pane and used the default WizTree install then every folder (in File Explorer) should have a right click context menu item that launches Wiztree for just the folder subtree.
if you start from command.com or Powershell then you can pass a subdirectory path as an argument (with a switchy? I don't recall ATM) or make a shortcut comman to launch WizTree for a subfolder.
It definitely seems useful to have a view where folders are simply boxes with ---names--- in their top border. A folder could also be a simple outline with its name in front of the file names.
Something like this
https://img.go-here.nl/folder-view.png
Could you share the name of the software it is/was, or perhaps a link?
If the folder name is long it should probably fail back on the normal tree view rather than putting it in front of the files in the box. But then you get a mix of solutions which is undesirable.
I'm afraid people are to used to the traditional tree view. It is a surprisingly good solution now that I've bothered to think about it.
Folders should probably just have a value in the size column and the screens are large enough to have a column for the number of files. (the pilot does F:21 S:123) Empty folder and file font colors can be slightly translucent.
I used that since Win95.
Directory Opus can also calculate & display the sizes of folders including all child content. (The calculation is nearly instant if Everything integration is enabled.)
As for exlorer... The only drawback to your request is, obviously, the need for recursive FS scan, which is expensive. That is why it is not in-built in default file explorer functionality. But XnView, for example, optionally shows brief content of directories (e.g. 4 mini-thumbs over a directory icon).
It looks old skool now it did its job well.
[0] https://files.community/
Was it coded in electron? What's filepilot made in?
There are a couple of reasons why I didn't want to make MFT the default.
a) It requires admin access.
b) It's NTFS specific, which means you need to write different logic for other file systems anyway.
c) It's not officially documented or supported by Microsoft. It was reverse-engineered.
And then there is literally instant, for literally everything, while the app itself is in normal mode and thus preserves the non-admin benefits.
a) Not for the app, only for Everything
b) Those other file systems could also be indexed by Everything (though via a slower mechanism). Also given the primacy of NTFS, I'd definitely trade the ability to have folder sizes for drives I rarely use for the instant calculations on drives I use all the time
c) Good. Waiting for MS docs could mean a few more decades of wasted potential
The Windows built-in File Explorer is godawfully slow. Like, slower than I remember it being in the late 90's. Motivation-sappingly slow. But I think it's because my work computer has it's inescapable synchronisation to OneDrive, and so every folder and every file it has to scan for a thumbnail or whatever, waits for it's data from OneDrive like a happy little idiot.
Funnily enough, navigating a remote directory on my NAS from my home Linux desktop is blazingly fast as if the files are local.
Windows or the Corporate Environment, or the combination of the two, is creating so much overhead that it feels like going back in time 25+ years.
It looks stunning. Well done!