21 ms·

File Pilot: A file explorer built for speed with a modern, robust interface

331 points by vjekoslav 2y ago

bityard 2y ago
From the screenshots (which are videos), it sure looks a lot like what you would get if you ported KDE's Dolphin to Windows.
- sho_hn 2y ago
  It's likely not tested very well, but in principle you can build and run Dolphin on Windows.
- forgotpwd16 2y ago
  Dolphin is available for Windows[0]. [0]: https://cdn.kde.org/ci-builds/system/dolphin/master/windows/ https://cdn.kde.org/ci-builds/system/dolphin/master/windows/
SanJacobs 2y ago
With everything hand-written from scratch in C, just like God intended. Great work.
- antonvs 2y ago
  Proof that the answer to the problem of evil is "Yeah, so what?"
L0th4r 2y ago
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.
- vjekoslav 2y ago
  PDF previews are not supported yet, but they are planned.
  - L0th4r 2y ago
    Awesome! Look forward to testing it more when pdf previews are added.
webdevver 2y ago
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.
- Marsymars 2y ago
  > being able to hold down Ctrl-T, and just have it open tabs at the speed of the typematic rate is such a joy. The Opera web browser used to do this before the switch to Chromium. I don’t know that any modern browser has this performance capability.
gervwyk 2y ago
Please make a mac version.
- ElectroSlayer 2y ago
  [dead]
- vjekoslav 2y ago
  I will.
  - qmmmur 2y ago
    I will pay for it!
huhtenberg 2y ago
Found plenty of screencaps on the Handmade page [1] and it looks refreshingly snappy ... and under 2MB in size! Excellent work, OP. Complements to the chef. [1] https://filepilot.handmade.network https://filepilot.handmade.network
- yoyohello13 2y ago
  I was at Handmade Seattle in 2023 and the auditorium cheered when he was showing off the prototype and did a file search in <1 second, lol.
quyleanh 2y ago
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
- yoyohello13 2y ago
  > I just hope Microsoft can do something like that with current Explorer app 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.
  - pjc50 2y ago
    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)
    - sirwhinesalot 2y ago
      File Pilot supports explorer extensions... There's an actual animation showing it on the website. What do you mean by "limiting the feature set"?
    - eviks 2y ago
      > 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 Why would this parallel background task have any impact on Explorer's startup time or UI responsiveness?
- BLKNSLVR 2y ago
  > It's good now Are you able to clarify what it does better now than it did 10, 15, 20 years ago?
- 2y ago
sigmonsays 2y ago
Please make a linux version!
V__ 2y ago
It looks really great. Is there something similar for Linux?
- exceptione 2y ago
  KDE Dolphin.
- RachelF 2y ago
  Double commander?
- Cloudef 2y ago
  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.
  - Sweepi 2y ago
    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?
    - exceptione 2y ago
      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.
      - kps 2y ago
willaaam 2y ago
Please, I beg you dear developer, replace my stupid MacOS finder with your superpowers!
- CharlesW 2y ago
  There are a few good Finder alternatives for macOS, including Path Finder, ForkLift, Commander One, and Double Commander (FOSS).
  - kstrauser 2y ago
    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.
    - fatboy 2y ago
      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.
      - kstrauser 2y ago
        Oof. Those hit close to home for me, too.
  - code_biologist 2y ago
    Path Finder went to a subscription-only model, no way to outright purchase a license sadly.
thecrumb 2y ago
Windows only? Why would I use (buy) this over DirectoryOpus? That said would love to see it on Linux.
- jacobgkau 2y ago
  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.
  - II2II 2y ago
    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.)
    - speckx 2y ago
      In addition to Directory Opus, I also miss https://www.xyplorer.com/ https://www.xyplorer.com/ on Windows since I’m on Linux.
  - netsharc 2y ago
    I prefer to use Win10 and probably move to Linux after that, so the interface doesn't match the rest of my OS. It's incredibly fast though. 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.
    - deleted 2y ago
yoyopa 2y ago
[dead]
endigma 2y ago
Rather poetically, this C software in 2025 segfaults on launch. I would file a GitHub issue if this was open source, but alas, nope.
- vjekoslav 2y ago
  Are you running it inside a VM or Wine?
  - endigma 2y ago
    Nope, just the installer, win11
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
mrgoldenbrown 2y ago
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?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- sumedh 2y ago
  Windows only for now, other OS coming soon
- vjekoslav 2y ago
  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.
yarone 2y ago
Ha, reminds me of XTREE GOLD, from the late 80's / early 90's. A time where the default file explorer was unbearable.
- hackyhacky 2y ago
  I still have the XTree keyboard shortcuts embedded in my muscle memory.
nipperkinfeet 2y ago
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.
- quyleanh 2y ago
  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.
- stavros 2y ago
  What GUI framework did they use for this?
  - qingcharles 2y ago
    This is all I found: "It's written in C and has custom OpenGL renderer." https://filepilot.handmade.network/ https://filepilot.handmade.network/
  - sachahjkl 2y ago
    Made it himself
  - pjc50 2y ago
    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. edit: report of poor CJK support https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43100494 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43100494 ; Windows file system encoding is annoying because it's UTF-16.
    - regularfry 2y ago
      This is always, always the tradeoff with custom UIs. The edge cases eat you alive.
unquietwiki 2y ago
Looks promising, but I'm hard-pressed to think the $40/individual price point is reasonable. $10-20?
- ap-andersson 2y ago
  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.
  - eps 2y ago
    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.
- prox 2y ago
  Yeah, this feels more like a 25-35 tops type of software, I wouldn’t think twice. At least the beta is still free now. $50 which is the default price, is too much.
  - arresin 2y ago
    For something you use everyday multiple times per day? Good software costs money.
martin_henk 2y ago
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
user_7832 2y ago
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.
- sorenjan 2y ago
  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.
  - user_7832 2y ago
    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!
    - defrost 2y ago
      WizTree can be used to navigate about a subtree, 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.
esafak 2y ago
Back when I used to torment myself with Windows, I used to use Zabkat Xplorer². https://www.zabkat.com/ https://www.zabkat.com/ It looks old skool now it did its job well.
- basch 2y ago
  Saladin was a great dual pane navigator https://saladin.mimec.org https://saladin.mimec.org
sorenjan 2y ago
Another file explorer option is Files [0], that looks a lot more like the built in Explorer in Windows but with some additional features. [0] https://files.community/ https://files.community/
- xyx0826 2y ago
  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!
  - 6510 2y ago
    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.
  - kawaiikouhai 2y ago
    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?
  - Kuraj 2y ago
    Yeah I had to give up on Files because of the performance too. I'm glad this exists.
free_bip 2y ago
Now imagine how nice Windows would be if every OS GUI was re-designed like this
eviks 2y ago
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
- tobwen 2y ago
  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.
- vjekoslav 2y ago
  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.
  - eviks 2y ago
    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
BLKNSLVR 2y ago
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.
- egeozcan 2y ago
  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.
  - metalman 2y ago
    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
  - kristianp 2y ago
    Maybe it's Onedrive. My older laptop has Onedrive and dropbox (not on the same folders) and Explorer runs like molasses in the dropbox folder.
- 2y ago
6510 2y ago
I join the mailing-list but I only wanted was an email when the beta is over. It looks stunning. Well done!
satvikpendem 2y ago
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.
keyle 2y ago
I've followed this developer for a while, I'm glad to see it finally out in the open. Then I looked at the pricing... wow, you really gotta dislike explorer.exe.
- egeozcan 2y ago
  It's a one-time purchase of 40 bucks. 200 for priority support. It's not peanuts for many people but far from overpriced IMHO.
  - rob74 2y ago
    40 € includes one year of updates, if you want lifetime updates, you have to pay 200 €. Good old Total Commander, the all-time classic alternative file manager for Windows, costs 42 € + VAT with lifetime updates (https://www.ghisler.com/order.htm https://www.ghisler.com/order.htm). But yeah, I have to admit that the application looks as dated as the website...
    - M95D 2y ago
      I like dated. I used it since it was called Windows Commander, on Win311. Unfortunately Total Commander is starting to become bloated too. The file copy/move window, the one with the progress bars, looks horrible in v11.
  - marticode 2y ago
    40 bucks feels alright but 200 (five times as much !) feels excessive. How much priority support does one need for a file explorer? Also yes 200 gives you free upgrades but you have to assume there'll be many years of development and many upgrades to recoup the cost vs buying the regular license.
- hackermanai 2y ago
  I don't even dislike default file explorers that much and will buy this (whenever they release Mac one). I like to buy good software.
- 2y ago
schiho 2y ago
I was looking for this one feature listing: fast file deletes, guess that’s just how windows rolls
- pjc50 2y ago
  You can't really beat the NTFS API being horribly slow. Well, maybe you could, just as "Everything" file search achieves speed by bypassing the API entirely, but I think an application that wrote raw NTFS block writes would be rather high risk for most people to use.
semantecture 2y ago
Nice work, really snappy, love the "speed at the your fingertips" approach. I absolutly am willing to shell out some EUR for such life-altering tools. I have been entrenched in the https://www.ghisler.com/ https://www.ghisler.com/ camp for 20+ years for three main reasons: 1. function keys for copy/move etc. like in mc, norton etc. 2. navigate (even larger) archive files in every format under the sun as if it were an extension of the file system. Blazingly fast and seamless. 3. the rich ecosystem of viewers , add-ons that has been added by the community at https://totalcmd.net/ https://totalcmd.net/ over decades and is supported by the open source alternative implementation https://doublecmd.sourceforge.io/ https://doublecmd.sourceforge.io/ Any roadmap that has some of this on the list? [edited spelling] Thanks for the cool work!
- vjekoslav 2y ago
  Thanks for trying it out! I was a long-time TC user too. 1) Those are not assigned by default, but all hotkeys in FP are reassignable, so you can create a setup very similar to TC. 2) This is a planned feature. 3) Not currently on the roadmap, but it's a possibility.
  - semantecture 2y ago
    Thank you for the reply. Really looking forward to the archive file navigation, and will use your tool. I am already sensing that the snappiness is pretty addictive, and it will be hard to go back to anything slower... Keeping my fingers crossed for your product!
  - qingcharles 2y ago
    This app is game-changing. It makes Windows vastly more useable as someone who needs a dozen tabs open all day in Explorer. As soon as I have spare cash next month I'm paying. The sheer hours saved from having to restart Explorer daily..! Only one single feature request: can you allow thumbnails larger than Windows sizes? https://ritt.app https://ritt.app does this well with a slider in settings.
    - 2y ago
progbits 2y ago
Wow that TortoiseSVN in context menu is a blast from the past! Looks like it's still under active development. Is SVN still being used in some industries? I know it used to be big in gamedev but I would have expected everyone to have moved on by now.
- Sweepi 2y ago
  TortoiseSVN (+Winmerge as diff tool) still is my go-to for non-programmers. If the person groks the windows explorer, TortoiseSVN just makes everything better and nothing worse. Log/History, Blame, Add, Update, ..: everything of importance is in the context menu. Also the trunk/stable model is more intuitive then "everybody has a branch and then there are merges, and merges of merges....". Did show it to lawyer and he got it in an hour.
- hermitcrab 2y ago
  I still use TortoiseSVN. I have run my own 1-man software company for the last 20 years and don't see any advantage in switching to Git or similar.
- mrcomplicated 2y ago
  SVN is used in the movies industry as far as I can remember. Especially 3d artists use this for synchronizing their models.
- dazzawazza 2y ago
  It's still used with Unreal Engine when people don't want to pay the Perforce tax. Although most of the "hip young kids" waste their time with git+lfs the people actually getting work done on LARGE projects still rely on Subversion... and probably tortoise.
usmanmehmood55 2y ago
This is SO much better than Windows explorer! And I'm more than happy to pay for it. The only issue I have noticed is that the context menu takes a while to open, and it is made worse because of the opening and closing animation. It keeps bugging me because I feel like the context menu of Windows explorer is a bit snappier than this. I might be wrong but that's what it feels like.
- vjekoslav 2y ago
  That's FP waiting for Windows. When it takes longer, it's usually a third-party plugin initializing. I have some things to try to mitigate these issues, but unfortunately, this whole architecture is broken. MS should not have allowed extensions to take over.
  - mrlinx 2y ago
    Would you recommend any app to "troubleshoot" these delays? Maybe a tool that helps seeing which extensions take long to load?
    - tredre3 2y ago
      ShellExView can be used to track down slow extensions (but it doesn't offer runtime performance numbers): https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/shexview.html https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/shexview.html
troffed 2y ago
Really, really, really impressive the speed of that piece of software. I tested it with a bit of skepticism, but it left me open-mouthed at the speed with which it does everything. I will test it for a few days and if it is confirmed, I will not hesitate to purchase a license.
- vjekoslav 2y ago
  Thank you!
warlock_0707 2y ago
It's so fast, it makes my nervous system twitch.
vim-guru 2y ago
You might as well sell this to Microsoft—they'd pay well, and more people would get to benefit from your great work! It really makes you wonder what kind of bloat is slowing down Explorer and whether it's lurking elsewhere too.
- vjekoslav 2y ago
  It's an open possibility :)
- deburo 2y ago
  Looking at PowerToys, they would probably turn it into a WinUI slug. I wonder what hardware the WinUi devs run it on.
enoch2090 2y ago
Looks pretty good but all CJK characters are displayed as questionmarks (???) and switching to a CJK native font does no help. So my user folder is now crowded with ???????? which makes it hard to navigate :(
- vjekoslav 2y ago
  Unfortunately, I only support Latin and Cyrillic for now. But full unicode support will come in the future.
  - enoch2090 2y ago
    Can't wait to replace my explorer with this, hope the support will come soon
prell 2y ago
This is great indeed but IMO only tech nerds can really appreciate it. My son is 10 and he never really needs to deal with real files. Nowadays normal kids just go any given app to access their photos or docs or music or movies or really anything. The notion of copying a file has been replaced by sharing, renaming doesn't really exists when it comes to photos for example and folder structure (when available) is some form of tags and labels depending on the particular app. It's sad. What do you think, are files a thing of the past?
- wasteduniverse 2y ago
  [dead]
- DCH3416 2y ago
  Files will always exist conceptually as a way of expressing data. The notion of sharing exists because of sandboxing and the need to exchange data between apps. This has been extended beyond just apps to sharing between multiple users or endpoints. Actual file naming for some objects has been superseded by meta data and tagging because it provides a better way of describing the thing. The goal has always been to pull file management away from users. Because they don't need to know or care how the internal data structures work. So yes, in a sense file management is trending towards more of a need to know basis.
AlexDragusin 2y ago
The best part of this is the typing for a system command once you right click a file, helps a lot to quickly get to items I need to run on the file. Microsoft should done something like this in W11 instead of the shitty extra menu nonsense and many other annoyances on W11. Microsoft, watch out for "garage" people like vjekoslav here.
physiox 2y ago
Wow, it's so lightweight. Thank you! Are you thinking about expanding the language support besides english?
- vjekoslav 2y ago
  Yes, proper localization will be probably be included in first official V1 version.
throw39299 2y ago
I like Windows Explorer because of the Directory Tree. I like being able to expand a folder on the left hand side, and any folder inside it will also be shown nested underneath it. I've been looking for a similar file explorer for MacOS, but all of them follow the the MacOS Finder method.
- innerHTML 2y ago
  I had the same issue with linux, I am using PcManFM but frankly it's not as good as explorer. I very much prefer the old explorer that drew the tree and branches. None of file managers I tried had this basic functionality.
bythreads 2y ago
so....does it fix the abysmal speed of copying files in windows?
nanna 2y ago
This is HN so don't bash me for saying this, but Emacs Dired rinses this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMWwM8QJAtU&t=1s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMWwM8QJAtU&t=1s
- scarfaceneo 2y ago
  Two completely unrelated products.
  - nanna 2y ago
    Dired, the file manager that comes in Emacs, is 'completely unrelated' to a file manager named File Pilot?
    - mexicocitinluez 2y ago
      Yes. A file manager tied to Emacs is completely unrelated to a Windows-based file system app. You're trying to make your video relevant and it's not.
      - nanna 2y ago
        You do realise that Emacs runs in Windows?
        dharmab 2y ago
        I showed this to a bunch of friends none of whom use emacs and they're _really_ excited about it. Most of them aren't programmers.
        mexicocitinluez 2y ago
        You do realize that Windows already has a file explorer. How stupid is it to have to argue with someone that "No, your ancient IDE's file explorer is not the same as Windows file exploerer and no one is going to download EMACS so that they can browse windows files easier"
leimbacher 2y ago
Could somebody please explain how people are ready to invest their own time into development of such projects? I mean it's so risky and at the same time one still has to pay the bills.
- anthony88 2y ago
  I can't answer for the File Pilot author but I've spent many years on writing a file manager. * It's fun to write and to use. It's like craftmanship. * Hopefully some companies/people will realize how many hours they waste using the default OS file manager * It's less risky than developing a game full time (I think) * Sure, I lost a lot of money to not having a normal job but my bills are low and my priority is more happiness
  - tredre3 2y ago
    > It's like craftmanship. I've come to realize (mainly by reading comments on this very forum) that, for an increasing amount of people, programming is just a job and they don't see it as an art form or a hobby. They genuinely cannot fathom that someone would spend time on ANY project without being paid. It's very sad but ultimately society couldn't function of we only hired passion-driven programmers, so eh.
    - Kuraj 2y ago
      To be honest I'm just burn out after 8 hours of coding for work, to do even more coding after.
- JavierFlores09 2y ago
  I'd like to believe any developer has more than a few pet projects around which they dedicate their time into whenever one has free time. Some get forgotten, others are overly specific to be marketed at all but maybe that one in a hundred has the opportunity to become a good investment, so it is just matter of buckling up and trying to ship it to the world. This doesn't mean it's going to make you financially successful, but actually delivering products does give you the experience of knowing what makes a successful one if anything at all. If you are lucky, you may break even in terms of time/resources spent after all the ordeal and you also get experience, though I wouldn't say that's the experience of most for the first few times, there's always a point in trying.
mherrmann 2y ago
I once devoted 2 years of my life to developing a file manager called fman [1]. In total, it generated probably 35,000$ in profits, so my income from the project is somewhere around 10 $/h. As software developers, our opportunity costs are high. I use my file manager to this day and love it. But I regret spending so much time on it. Congratulations on your launch. I wish you more success than I've had. Failing that, I wish you that you will see earlier than I did when it is time to move on. I once recorded a video about my experiences developing a file manager [2]. Maybe you'll also find some interesting bits and pieces on fman's blog [3]. Incidentally, an article there is what sparked my current venture, which is much more profitable: consulting services around automatic updates. If you'd like to have a chat, feel free to reach out. My contact info is on my website. :-) Good luck! [1]: https://fman.io https://fman.io [2]: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=I1K3IkOlaVw https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=I1K3IkOlaVw [3]: https://fman.io/blog/ https://fman.io/blog/
- zerr 2y ago
  Good to know, thanks for the insight. I was playing with the idea of creating a similar app, with more features and faster (in C++). I guess there is no much demand for modern NC clones, orthodox file managers. Btw, are the sales still going on?
  - mherrmann 2y ago
    I put it down to desktop utility apps being a very tough market because 1. they are time-consuming to develop and 2. people hate paying for desktop software. You already have several comments in this very thread from people complaining about the price: * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43102477 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43102477 * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43099230 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43099230 * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43097749 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43097749 Ah and yes, I'm still getting a handful of fman sales per month. But nowhere near enough to justify any time investment.
    - zerr 2y ago
      Did you experiment with different pricing? I wonder if slashing the price significantly would boost sales so much that it becomes viable a product.
stuaxo 2y ago
This looks decent, I'd use it outside of Windows if it was available there.
firecall 2y ago
This is so great, and I've been sharing it with anyone I know that is on Windows or has to suffer Explorer in Windows 11! Thank you for providing a column with Folder Sizes as well! This is so useful, and yet MS still don't provide this feature in Explorer. I have a question about "Empty Recycle Bin": Is it possible to provide access to Emptying the Recycle Bin that doesn't require right clicking on the desktop icon? It sounds trivial, but this would be a killer feature for me and a couple of other people I know! It's so handy in Mac OS to be able to right click on the Trash Icon in the Dock!
- vjekoslav 2y ago
  Yes, there's a command called "Empty Trash Items", which you can assign to any hotkey or access via the command palette. You can also right click on the trash in the left sidebar.
RNAlfons 2y ago
This is a really sexy explorer. I love it. Love how snappy it is, love the thought that went into it, love the dark design. Awesome. I'll keep using the beta at work as long as I can but unfortunately I won't get funds to buy it for work. It's too bad that you can get updates only for one year with the normal license. Would have considered buying it for the price for private use but 200 is just too much for a file explorer.
smusamashah 2y ago
Been waiting for this to be released. Thanks. Feedback: Show complete file name in thumbnail view. Currently its replaced with ...
DCH3416 2y ago
It seems to require the actual windows explorer to be running. Which kinda negates its potential as a shell replacement.
- tredre3 2y ago
  Maybe I misunderstand what you mean, but Windows Explorer is also the shell on Windows (handles things like the task bar and the desktop icons), so you will always see it running in the background.
  - DCH3416 2y ago
    Windows doesn't need explorer to actually function, it's just another component that adds optional extras to the desktop environment such as the task bar and desktop icons. Kill explorer.exe, your desktop and taskbar disappear, but programs still operate and can be manipulated and minimized, just in a more Win3.1 style flavor. A file browser window can be called directly without the explorer shell running, "explorer.exe /e". Problem occurs when you have programs that dip into explorer's shell components expecting them to be running when that might not be the case. For that case you couldn't fully turn explorer off if you were, for example, trimming down a modern version of windows.
shlomo_z 2y ago
This looks cool. But it seems to keep files separate from folders. Is it possible to sort by data modified with files and folders together?
- vjekoslav 2y ago
  Yes, the separation between folders and files is a toggleable option. You can sort by date modified. Also, you should try it yourself, it's in free beta. :)
  - shlomo_z 2y ago
    I did try, and I did not find the option whether to separate between file and folders, so I will look more carefully.
123sereusername 2y ago
[dead]
otterpro 2y ago
I've been using a free file explorer called Q-Dir (http://www.q-dir.com http://www.q-dir.com) by a guy who writes a lot of these types of utilities for windows. It has a quirky UI and it has 4 quadrants by default, but once I got used to using it, it was almost life-changing. It is compatible with every windows, even windows 98. It's updated fairly frequently, even till now.
Night_Thastus 2y ago
How does this compare to the existing Explorer alternatives? IE: OneCommander, Directory Opus and to a lesser extent TotalCommander and Multi Commander. What would be the major features it offers that others do not?
- vjekoslav 2y ago
  Speed, modern UI, rearangable panels & tabs, globaly accesable and remmapable all actions via cmd palette, GoTo window, batch rename... And many more things to come. Since this was built from scratch, a lot of time and enginering effort was put into building a solid base. I'm in a phase where adding new stuff is fairly frictionless, so it's gonna get a lot better in the coming months. That being said, it's only 3 years old, very young compared to other long time players. So, it's not comparable feature for feature, yet.
johny115 2y ago
okay ... - it's fast (great!) - it can't play videos in preview pane (very bad) or display some types of images (webp) - design is nice but there is too much padding in thumbnail view and no way to control it (not good) - it's super similar to Files - https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9nghp3dx8hdx?hl=en-US&gl=US https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9nghp3dx8hdx?hl=en-US&gl=U... , except that one can play videos and is more than 20x cheaper - price, the Files I mentioned cost $8.99, I'd never thought i'd dish out any money on file explorer but here we go, yours is faster and if the full release will perfect the areas i mentioned, id pay up to $19 for it ... now asking $200 for file explorer is just mad ... i am in B2B so I know pains of dev software, but if I see such price, Id just be giving imaginary thumbs up to people who pirate this instead, unless this has some crazy super powers and is meant for some very specific professionals for business (I don't see the use case), there is no justification for such price, even from point of view of maximum greed I highly doubt with such prices youd be squeezing the most revenue out of market you could, the yearly plan is more of a slap in a face, software without updates is useless, especially since its early in development and will see lot of basic polish in first few years if worked on .. i wouldn't buy it, but something along $49 for it wouldn't at least scream offensive ... id just look at that with disappointment and move on, even that would be basically asking for the price of AAA videogame, for minor improvement of utility in Windows - that said, good luck ... I saw lot of people here post what they use; i dont want to offend anyone, but seems devs don't have cells for visual taste, those don't compare with yours, but you seem to have the speed of those (sort of, once i opened folder with 4k images, it completely froze for a full minute, windows explorer wouldn't do that, so ... speed is good, but can't sacrifice reliability for it.)
davidjade 2y ago
I really like this and I think it is off to a good start. But I also think there will be interesting/hard corner cases (such as offline/reparse point files - I logged a request for that in Discord). I don't think it needs to cover every special case but that's because I don't really want to use it to be a Explorer replacement. I see it rather as a supplemental tool.
rkagerer 2y ago
Where does it store configuration info? (e.g. like the flag that you chose the "Standalone" option) Is there a forum, or something non-Discord where you can see community-answered tech questions previously asked (without having to log into anything)?
pkkm 2y ago
1.8 MB standalone executable! That's cool to see in an era of huge apps.
kapitanluffy 2y ago
Based from the previews in the website, all I can say is that this is awesome! It feels very inspired by Sublime Text! Even the low-tier license seems inspired by ST; you buy a license, use it forever but won't get updates Looking upfront, I know you will succeed on this. I remember way back there was a file manager who did the similar thing. It is very ST-inspired. It got all the hype given how "sleek" the application is. It even did an "open-source promise" thing. It was very promising at that time until the developer went.. not sure how to describe it but for the lack of a better term, "profit-focused". Ironically, it does make a profit; as stated on the website. That app is still around. Not sure if the dev is still active but the issue tracker is. Last I heard from the dev is a YT "tear down" video. I guess at the end of the day, the guy is a "business man" and would do his best to make money. I hope you stay focused on delivering a good product. Collaborate with your community and rest-assured, profits will follow. I dropped by your Discord. Ping me whenever!
dryanau 2y ago
I've been using this for a few days now, and while I love the speed, I have experienced a couple of glitches with the file list e.g. duplicate files/folders shown, files missing, especially after doing a bunch of move/copy operations. I would have expected hitting F5 to refresh the view but I had to close the application and open again (blazingly fast) to get a fresh view of the folder's contents. It happened in side-by-side view, if relevant. Presumably some bug in the caching mechanism, at the very least I would force F5/refresh to do a fresh query of the current folders' contents and display correctly.
wink 2y ago
As I see a lot of talk about people seemingly happy to pay for this, apparently because they think they will gain something out of it. Backstory: My main machine at home is Windows (for games) and all other computers I have used since about 2010 have had Linux or FreeBSD on them (unless employer provided). As I'm a bit of a distro and DE hopper it happened to me more than once than I couldn't remember how my current GUI file manager was called... simply because I hadn't started it for half a year or longer. (Since then I've installed thunar most of the time). And I find this so fascinating because I use the Windows Explorer all the time. So either I am simply doing different things on Linux (while working and coding in my spare time) - or I use the shell so much that I don't even think about using a GUI file manager, if I have a proper shell available (not a fan of WSL). I plan to switch to Linux even on my gaming PC this year, we'll see if it works out... Long story short: I am not averse to paying for good software (although I prefer it to be FLOSS and I contribute in a miniscule way by reporting bugs, sometimes fixing them) - but if I'm not on Windows I am not the target audience _at all_. And I find it kinda surprising. Anyway, I wish the author good luck.
Sweepi 2y ago
Quick questions/observations: 1. Is there a way to reassign/set keyboard shortcuts? 2. Is there a keyboard shortcut for opening the "hamburger/3-dots" menu? 3. In the "hamburger/3-dots" menu, there is an option the open a cmd shell, but there seems to be no shortcut for it. 4. While in "quick filter mode" the context menu key does not work (but the context menu does when using right mouse button) [1] In windows explorer and File Pilot, you can access the "breadcrumbs" bar with ALT+D. In Windows explorer you then can enter "cmd" to get a cmd shell at the current location. This does not work in File Pilot. [1] If this does work for other people: My keyboard does not have a context menu key, therefore I use the following AutoHotkeyScript to rebind F13 (labeled mute/unmute on the keycap) to "open context menu", which so far has work everywhere, but I still wanted to mention. F13::AppsKey return
- nguyenkien 2y ago
  Ctrl+Shift+P > cmd
rrgok 2y ago
Man..I've been evaluating Directory Opus these past days. I still did not try FilePilot. I was almost ready to buy Dopus, now I don't know. Can you opensource the GUI part? It would be really useful for other people that want to build these kind of apps.
mwcampbell 2y ago
Nice work. I noticed, though, that there's no accessibility for blind people or others who need assistive technology that uses the platform accessibility API. If you can accept a Rust dependency, here's my project for solving this problem: https://accesskit.dev/ https://accesskit.dev/ We do provide pre-compiled static libraries of the C binding, so you don't need to directly introduce Rust into your build process. I specifically kept immediate-mode toolkits in mind when designing AccessKit. Or if you'd rather just look at our code and implement the accessibility APIs yourself, that's cool too.
- vjekoslav 2y ago
  Hello! I can't promise anything on this topic yet, it's on my list, but it's fairly low priority right now. The program was written in C with no dependencies, so introducing a huge dependency like that isn't an option. But I appreciate the advice!
  - mwcampbell 2y ago
    I'm curious, how did you conclude that AccessKit is a huge dependency? The binary size does vary by platform, with the Linux backend being especially large due to its use of a pure-Rust implementation of D-Bus. But the Windows x64 DLL is 268 KB, and the macOS x86-64 dylib is 437 KB stripped. The impact of the static library on your binary size will probably be about the same, or maybe a little less because most applications don't require all of the little setter and (especially) getter functions. I'm not happy with the size on Linux, but I think it's acceptable on Windows and macOS, given that accessibility is, in many contexts, a must-have.
    - vjekoslav 2y ago
      Sorry, I based this on your comment "If you can accept a Rust dependency". I haven't actually looked into it yet, but I'll check it out, thanks for sharing. However, I'd still prefer to go with my own solution, if possible, for tighter integration.
IYasha 2y ago
Lol. I've had dreadful feelings reading through comments - is windows explorer THAT BAD now? I'm still on 7 in native UI mode and blissfully unaware of terror MS have unleashed onto the world. And waiting for linux to become useful to switch.
- vjekoslav 2y ago
  File Explorer on Windows 7, and Windows 7 in general, provided a far better (and faster) user experience. It's been downhill since then.

331 points by vjekoslav 2y ago

From the screenshots (which are videos), it sure looks a lot like what you would get if you ported KDE's Dolphin to Windows.

sho_hn 2y ago
It's likely not tested very well, but in principle you can build and run Dolphin on Windows.
forgotpwd16 2y ago
Dolphin is available for Windows[0]. [0]: https://cdn.kde.org/ci-builds/system/dolphin/master/windows/ https://cdn.kde.org/ci-builds/system/dolphin/master/windows/

SanJacobs 2y ago

With everything hand-written from scratch in C, just like God intended. Great work.

antonvs 2y ago
Proof that the answer to the problem of evil is "Yeah, so what?"

L0th4r 2y ago

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.

vjekoslav 2y ago
PDF previews are not supported yet, but they are planned.
- L0th4r 2y ago
  Awesome! Look forward to testing it more when pdf previews are added.

webdevver 2y ago

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.

Marsymars 2y ago
> being able to hold down Ctrl-T, and just have it open tabs at the speed of the typematic rate is such a joy. The Opera web browser used to do this before the switch to Chromium. I don’t know that any modern browser has this performance capability.

gervwyk 2y ago

Please make a mac version.

ElectroSlayer 2y ago
[dead]
vjekoslav 2y ago
I will.
- qmmmur 2y ago
  I will pay for it!

huhtenberg 2y ago

Found plenty of screencaps on the Handmade page [1] and it looks refreshingly snappy ... and under 2MB in size! Excellent work, OP. Complements to the chef. [1] https://filepilot.handmade.network https://filepilot.handmade.network

yoyohello13 2y ago
I was at Handmade Seattle in 2023 and the auditorium cheered when he was showing off the prototype and did a file search in <1 second, lol.

quyleanh 2y ago

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

yoyohello13 2y ago
> I just hope Microsoft can do something like that with current Explorer app 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.
- pjc50 2y ago
  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)
  - sirwhinesalot 2y ago
    File Pilot supports explorer extensions... There's an actual animation showing it on the website. What do you mean by "limiting the feature set"?
  - eviks 2y ago
    > 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 Why would this parallel background task have any impact on Explorer's startup time or UI responsiveness?
BLKNSLVR 2y ago
> It's good now Are you able to clarify what it does better now than it did 10, 15, 20 years ago?
2y ago

sigmonsays 2y ago

Please make a linux version!

V__ 2y ago

It looks really great. Is there something similar for Linux?

exceptione 2y ago
KDE Dolphin.
RachelF 2y ago
Double commander?
Cloudef 2y ago
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.
- Sweepi 2y ago
  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?
  - exceptione 2y ago
    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.
    - kps 2y ago

willaaam 2y ago

Please, I beg you dear developer, replace my stupid MacOS finder with your superpowers!

CharlesW 2y ago
There are a few good Finder alternatives for macOS, including Path Finder, ForkLift, Commander One, and Double Commander (FOSS).
- kstrauser 2y ago
  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.
  - fatboy 2y ago
    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.
    - kstrauser 2y ago
      Oof. Those hit close to home for me, too.
- code_biologist 2y ago
  Path Finder went to a subscription-only model, no way to outright purchase a license sadly.

thecrumb 2y ago

Windows only? Why would I use (buy) this over DirectoryOpus? That said would love to see it on Linux.

jacobgkau 2y ago
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.
- II2II 2y ago
  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.)
  - speckx 2y ago
    In addition to Directory Opus, I also miss https://www.xyplorer.com/ https://www.xyplorer.com/ on Windows since I’m on Linux.
- netsharc 2y ago
  I prefer to use Win10 and probably move to Linux after that, so the interface doesn't match the rest of my OS. It's incredibly fast though. 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.
  - deleted 2y ago

yoyopa 2y ago

[dead]

endigma 2y ago

Rather poetically, this C software in 2025 segfaults on launch. I would file a GitHub issue if this was open source, but alas, nope.

vjekoslav 2y ago
Are you running it inside a VM or Wine?
- endigma 2y ago
  Nope, just the installer, win11
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

mrgoldenbrown 2y ago

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?

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
sumedh 2y ago
Windows only for now, other OS coming soon
vjekoslav 2y ago
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.

yarone 2y ago

Ha, reminds me of XTREE GOLD, from the late 80's / early 90's. A time where the default file explorer was unbearable.

hackyhacky 2y ago
I still have the XTree keyboard shortcuts embedded in my muscle memory.

nipperkinfeet 2y ago

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.

quyleanh 2y ago
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.
stavros 2y ago
What GUI framework did they use for this?
- qingcharles 2y ago
  This is all I found: "It's written in C and has custom OpenGL renderer." https://filepilot.handmade.network/ https://filepilot.handmade.network/
- sachahjkl 2y ago
  Made it himself
- pjc50 2y ago
  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. edit: report of poor CJK support https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43100494 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43100494 ; Windows file system encoding is annoying because it's UTF-16.
  - regularfry 2y ago
    This is always, always the tradeoff with custom UIs. The edge cases eat you alive.

unquietwiki 2y ago

Looks promising, but I'm hard-pressed to think the $40/individual price point is reasonable. $10-20?

ap-andersson 2y ago
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.
- eps 2y ago
  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.
prox 2y ago
Yeah, this feels more like a 25-35 tops type of software, I wouldn’t think twice. At least the beta is still free now. $50 which is the default price, is too much.
- arresin 2y ago
  For something you use everyday multiple times per day? Good software costs money.

martin_henk 2y ago

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

user_7832 2y ago

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.

sorenjan 2y ago
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.
- user_7832 2y ago
  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!
  - defrost 2y ago
    WizTree can be used to navigate about a subtree, 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.

esafak 2y ago

Back when I used to torment myself with Windows, I used to use Zabkat Xplorer². https://www.zabkat.com/ https://www.zabkat.com/ It looks old skool now it did its job well.

basch 2y ago
Saladin was a great dual pane navigator https://saladin.mimec.org https://saladin.mimec.org

sorenjan 2y ago

Another file explorer option is Files [0], that looks a lot more like the built in Explorer in Windows but with some additional features. [0] https://files.community/ https://files.community/

xyx0826 2y ago
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!
- 6510 2y ago
  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.
- kawaiikouhai 2y ago
  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?
- Kuraj 2y ago
  Yeah I had to give up on Files because of the performance too. I'm glad this exists.

free_bip 2y ago

Now imagine how nice Windows would be if every OS GUI was re-designed like this

eviks 2y ago

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

tobwen 2y ago
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.
vjekoslav 2y ago
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.
- eviks 2y ago
  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

BLKNSLVR 2y ago

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.

egeozcan 2y ago
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.
- metalman 2y ago
  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
- kristianp 2y ago
  Maybe it's Onedrive. My older laptop has Onedrive and dropbox (not on the same folders) and Explorer runs like molasses in the dropbox folder.
2y ago

6510 2y ago

I join the mailing-list but I only wanted was an email when the beta is over. It looks stunning. Well done!

satvikpendem 2y ago

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.

keyle 2y ago

I've followed this developer for a while, I'm glad to see it finally out in the open. Then I looked at the pricing... wow, you really gotta dislike explorer.exe.

egeozcan 2y ago
It's a one-time purchase of 40 bucks. 200 for priority support. It's not peanuts for many people but far from overpriced IMHO.
- rob74 2y ago
  40 € includes one year of updates, if you want lifetime updates, you have to pay 200 €. Good old Total Commander, the all-time classic alternative file manager for Windows, costs 42 € + VAT with lifetime updates (https://www.ghisler.com/order.htm https://www.ghisler.com/order.htm). But yeah, I have to admit that the application looks as dated as the website...
  - M95D 2y ago
    I like dated. I used it since it was called Windows Commander, on Win311. Unfortunately Total Commander is starting to become bloated too. The file copy/move window, the one with the progress bars, looks horrible in v11.
- marticode 2y ago
  40 bucks feels alright but 200 (five times as much !) feels excessive. How much priority support does one need for a file explorer? Also yes 200 gives you free upgrades but you have to assume there'll be many years of development and many upgrades to recoup the cost vs buying the regular license.
hackermanai 2y ago
I don't even dislike default file explorers that much and will buy this (whenever they release Mac one). I like to buy good software.
2y ago

schiho 2y ago

I was looking for this one feature listing: fast file deletes, guess that’s just how windows rolls

pjc50 2y ago
You can't really beat the NTFS API being horribly slow. Well, maybe you could, just as "Everything" file search achieves speed by bypassing the API entirely, but I think an application that wrote raw NTFS block writes would be rather high risk for most people to use.

semantecture 2y ago

Nice work, really snappy, love the "speed at the your fingertips" approach. I absolutly am willing to shell out some EUR for such life-altering tools. I have been entrenched in the https://www.ghisler.com/ https://www.ghisler.com/ camp for 20+ years for three main reasons: 1. function keys for copy/move etc. like in mc, norton etc. 2. navigate (even larger) archive files in every format under the sun as if it were an extension of the file system. Blazingly fast and seamless. 3. the rich ecosystem of viewers , add-ons that has been added by the community at https://totalcmd.net/ https://totalcmd.net/ over decades and is supported by the open source alternative implementation https://doublecmd.sourceforge.io/ https://doublecmd.sourceforge.io/ Any roadmap that has some of this on the list? [edited spelling] Thanks for the cool work!

vjekoslav 2y ago
Thanks for trying it out! I was a long-time TC user too. 1) Those are not assigned by default, but all hotkeys in FP are reassignable, so you can create a setup very similar to TC. 2) This is a planned feature. 3) Not currently on the roadmap, but it's a possibility.
- semantecture 2y ago
  Thank you for the reply. Really looking forward to the archive file navigation, and will use your tool. I am already sensing that the snappiness is pretty addictive, and it will be hard to go back to anything slower... Keeping my fingers crossed for your product!
- qingcharles 2y ago
  This app is game-changing. It makes Windows vastly more useable as someone who needs a dozen tabs open all day in Explorer. As soon as I have spare cash next month I'm paying. The sheer hours saved from having to restart Explorer daily..! Only one single feature request: can you allow thumbnails larger than Windows sizes? https://ritt.app https://ritt.app does this well with a slider in settings.
  - 2y ago

progbits 2y ago

Wow that TortoiseSVN in context menu is a blast from the past! Looks like it's still under active development. Is SVN still being used in some industries? I know it used to be big in gamedev but I would have expected everyone to have moved on by now.

Sweepi 2y ago
TortoiseSVN (+Winmerge as diff tool) still is my go-to for non-programmers. If the person groks the windows explorer, TortoiseSVN just makes everything better and nothing worse. Log/History, Blame, Add, Update, ..: everything of importance is in the context menu. Also the trunk/stable model is more intuitive then "everybody has a branch and then there are merges, and merges of merges....". Did show it to lawyer and he got it in an hour.
hermitcrab 2y ago
I still use TortoiseSVN. I have run my own 1-man software company for the last 20 years and don't see any advantage in switching to Git or similar.
mrcomplicated 2y ago
SVN is used in the movies industry as far as I can remember. Especially 3d artists use this for synchronizing their models.
dazzawazza 2y ago
It's still used with Unreal Engine when people don't want to pay the Perforce tax. Although most of the "hip young kids" waste their time with git+lfs the people actually getting work done on LARGE projects still rely on Subversion... and probably tortoise.

usmanmehmood55 2y ago

This is SO much better than Windows explorer! And I'm more than happy to pay for it. The only issue I have noticed is that the context menu takes a while to open, and it is made worse because of the opening and closing animation. It keeps bugging me because I feel like the context menu of Windows explorer is a bit snappier than this. I might be wrong but that's what it feels like.

vjekoslav 2y ago
That's FP waiting for Windows. When it takes longer, it's usually a third-party plugin initializing. I have some things to try to mitigate these issues, but unfortunately, this whole architecture is broken. MS should not have allowed extensions to take over.
- mrlinx 2y ago
  Would you recommend any app to "troubleshoot" these delays? Maybe a tool that helps seeing which extensions take long to load?
  - tredre3 2y ago
    ShellExView can be used to track down slow extensions (but it doesn't offer runtime performance numbers): https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/shexview.html https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/shexview.html

troffed 2y ago

Really, really, really impressive the speed of that piece of software. I tested it with a bit of skepticism, but it left me open-mouthed at the speed with which it does everything. I will test it for a few days and if it is confirmed, I will not hesitate to purchase a license.

vjekoslav 2y ago
Thank you!

warlock_0707 2y ago

It's so fast, it makes my nervous system twitch.

vim-guru 2y ago

You might as well sell this to Microsoft—they'd pay well, and more people would get to benefit from your great work! It really makes you wonder what kind of bloat is slowing down Explorer and whether it's lurking elsewhere too.

vjekoslav 2y ago
It's an open possibility :)
deburo 2y ago
Looking at PowerToys, they would probably turn it into a WinUI slug. I wonder what hardware the WinUi devs run it on.

enoch2090 2y ago

Looks pretty good but all CJK characters are displayed as questionmarks (???) and switching to a CJK native font does no help. So my user folder is now crowded with ???????? which makes it hard to navigate :(

vjekoslav 2y ago
Unfortunately, I only support Latin and Cyrillic for now. But full unicode support will come in the future.
- enoch2090 2y ago
  Can't wait to replace my explorer with this, hope the support will come soon

prell 2y ago

This is great indeed but IMO only tech nerds can really appreciate it. My son is 10 and he never really needs to deal with real files. Nowadays normal kids just go any given app to access their photos or docs or music or movies or really anything. The notion of copying a file has been replaced by sharing, renaming doesn't really exists when it comes to photos for example and folder structure (when available) is some form of tags and labels depending on the particular app. It's sad. What do you think, are files a thing of the past?

wasteduniverse 2y ago
[dead]
DCH3416 2y ago
Files will always exist conceptually as a way of expressing data. The notion of sharing exists because of sandboxing and the need to exchange data between apps. This has been extended beyond just apps to sharing between multiple users or endpoints. Actual file naming for some objects has been superseded by meta data and tagging because it provides a better way of describing the thing. The goal has always been to pull file management away from users. Because they don't need to know or care how the internal data structures work. So yes, in a sense file management is trending towards more of a need to know basis.

AlexDragusin 2y ago

The best part of this is the typing for a system command once you right click a file, helps a lot to quickly get to items I need to run on the file. Microsoft should done something like this in W11 instead of the shitty extra menu nonsense and many other annoyances on W11. Microsoft, watch out for "garage" people like vjekoslav here.

physiox 2y ago

Wow, it's so lightweight. Thank you! Are you thinking about expanding the language support besides english?

vjekoslav 2y ago
Yes, proper localization will be probably be included in first official V1 version.

throw39299 2y ago

I like Windows Explorer because of the Directory Tree. I like being able to expand a folder on the left hand side, and any folder inside it will also be shown nested underneath it. I've been looking for a similar file explorer for MacOS, but all of them follow the the MacOS Finder method.

innerHTML 2y ago
I had the same issue with linux, I am using PcManFM but frankly it's not as good as explorer. I very much prefer the old explorer that drew the tree and branches. None of file managers I tried had this basic functionality.

bythreads 2y ago

so....does it fix the abysmal speed of copying files in windows?

nanna 2y ago

This is HN so don't bash me for saying this, but Emacs Dired rinses this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMWwM8QJAtU&t=1s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMWwM8QJAtU&t=1s

scarfaceneo 2y ago
Two completely unrelated products.
- nanna 2y ago
  Dired, the file manager that comes in Emacs, is 'completely unrelated' to a file manager named File Pilot?
  - mexicocitinluez 2y ago
    Yes. A file manager tied to Emacs is completely unrelated to a Windows-based file system app. You're trying to make your video relevant and it's not.
    - nanna 2y ago
      You do realise that Emacs runs in Windows?
      - dharmab 2y ago
        I showed this to a bunch of friends none of whom use emacs and they're _really_ excited about it. Most of them aren't programmers.
      - mexicocitinluez 2y ago
        You do realize that Windows already has a file explorer. How stupid is it to have to argue with someone that "No, your ancient IDE's file explorer is not the same as Windows file exploerer and no one is going to download EMACS so that they can browse windows files easier"

leimbacher 2y ago

Could somebody please explain how people are ready to invest their own time into development of such projects? I mean it's so risky and at the same time one still has to pay the bills.

anthony88 2y ago
I can't answer for the File Pilot author but I've spent many years on writing a file manager. * It's fun to write and to use. It's like craftmanship. * Hopefully some companies/people will realize how many hours they waste using the default OS file manager * It's less risky than developing a game full time (I think) * Sure, I lost a lot of money to not having a normal job but my bills are low and my priority is more happiness
- tredre3 2y ago
  > It's like craftmanship. I've come to realize (mainly by reading comments on this very forum) that, for an increasing amount of people, programming is just a job and they don't see it as an art form or a hobby. They genuinely cannot fathom that someone would spend time on ANY project without being paid. It's very sad but ultimately society couldn't function of we only hired passion-driven programmers, so eh.
  - Kuraj 2y ago
    To be honest I'm just burn out after 8 hours of coding for work, to do even more coding after.
JavierFlores09 2y ago
I'd like to believe any developer has more than a few pet projects around which they dedicate their time into whenever one has free time. Some get forgotten, others are overly specific to be marketed at all but maybe that one in a hundred has the opportunity to become a good investment, so it is just matter of buckling up and trying to ship it to the world. This doesn't mean it's going to make you financially successful, but actually delivering products does give you the experience of knowing what makes a successful one if anything at all. If you are lucky, you may break even in terms of time/resources spent after all the ordeal and you also get experience, though I wouldn't say that's the experience of most for the first few times, there's always a point in trying.

mherrmann 2y ago

I once devoted 2 years of my life to developing a file manager called fman [1]. In total, it generated probably 35,000$ in profits, so my income from the project is somewhere around 10 $/h. As software developers, our opportunity costs are high. I use my file manager to this day and love it. But I regret spending so much time on it. Congratulations on your launch. I wish you more success than I've had. Failing that, I wish you that you will see earlier than I did when it is time to move on. I once recorded a video about my experiences developing a file manager [2]. Maybe you'll also find some interesting bits and pieces on fman's blog [3]. Incidentally, an article there is what sparked my current venture, which is much more profitable: consulting services around automatic updates. If you'd like to have a chat, feel free to reach out. My contact info is on my website. :-) Good luck! [1]: https://fman.io https://fman.io [2]: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=I1K3IkOlaVw https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=I1K3IkOlaVw [3]: https://fman.io/blog/ https://fman.io/blog/

zerr 2y ago
Good to know, thanks for the insight. I was playing with the idea of creating a similar app, with more features and faster (in C++). I guess there is no much demand for modern NC clones, orthodox file managers. Btw, are the sales still going on?
- mherrmann 2y ago
  I put it down to desktop utility apps being a very tough market because 1. they are time-consuming to develop and 2. people hate paying for desktop software. You already have several comments in this very thread from people complaining about the price: * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43102477 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43102477 * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43099230 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43099230 * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43097749 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43097749 Ah and yes, I'm still getting a handful of fman sales per month. But nowhere near enough to justify any time investment.
  - zerr 2y ago
    Did you experiment with different pricing? I wonder if slashing the price significantly would boost sales so much that it becomes viable a product.

stuaxo 2y ago

This looks decent, I'd use it outside of Windows if it was available there.

firecall 2y ago

This is so great, and I've been sharing it with anyone I know that is on Windows or has to suffer Explorer in Windows 11! Thank you for providing a column with Folder Sizes as well! This is so useful, and yet MS still don't provide this feature in Explorer. I have a question about "Empty Recycle Bin": Is it possible to provide access to Emptying the Recycle Bin that doesn't require right clicking on the desktop icon? It sounds trivial, but this would be a killer feature for me and a couple of other people I know! It's so handy in Mac OS to be able to right click on the Trash Icon in the Dock!

vjekoslav 2y ago
Yes, there's a command called "Empty Trash Items", which you can assign to any hotkey or access via the command palette. You can also right click on the trash in the left sidebar.

RNAlfons 2y ago

This is a really sexy explorer. I love it. Love how snappy it is, love the thought that went into it, love the dark design. Awesome. I'll keep using the beta at work as long as I can but unfortunately I won't get funds to buy it for work. It's too bad that you can get updates only for one year with the normal license. Would have considered buying it for the price for private use but 200 is just too much for a file explorer.

smusamashah 2y ago

Been waiting for this to be released. Thanks. Feedback: Show complete file name in thumbnail view. Currently its replaced with ...

DCH3416 2y ago

It seems to require the actual windows explorer to be running. Which kinda negates its potential as a shell replacement.

tredre3 2y ago
Maybe I misunderstand what you mean, but Windows Explorer is also the shell on Windows (handles things like the task bar and the desktop icons), so you will always see it running in the background.
- DCH3416 2y ago
  Windows doesn't need explorer to actually function, it's just another component that adds optional extras to the desktop environment such as the task bar and desktop icons. Kill explorer.exe, your desktop and taskbar disappear, but programs still operate and can be manipulated and minimized, just in a more Win3.1 style flavor. A file browser window can be called directly without the explorer shell running, "explorer.exe /e". Problem occurs when you have programs that dip into explorer's shell components expecting them to be running when that might not be the case. For that case you couldn't fully turn explorer off if you were, for example, trimming down a modern version of windows.

shlomo_z 2y ago

This looks cool. But it seems to keep files separate from folders. Is it possible to sort by data modified with files and folders together?

vjekoslav 2y ago
Yes, the separation between folders and files is a toggleable option. You can sort by date modified. Also, you should try it yourself, it's in free beta. :)
- shlomo_z 2y ago
  I did try, and I did not find the option whether to separate between file and folders, so I will look more carefully.

123sereusername 2y ago

[dead]

otterpro 2y ago

I've been using a free file explorer called Q-Dir (http://www.q-dir.com http://www.q-dir.com) by a guy who writes a lot of these types of utilities for windows. It has a quirky UI and it has 4 quadrants by default, but once I got used to using it, it was almost life-changing. It is compatible with every windows, even windows 98. It's updated fairly frequently, even till now.

Night_Thastus 2y ago

How does this compare to the existing Explorer alternatives? IE: OneCommander, Directory Opus and to a lesser extent TotalCommander and Multi Commander. What would be the major features it offers that others do not?

vjekoslav 2y ago
Speed, modern UI, rearangable panels & tabs, globaly accesable and remmapable all actions via cmd palette, GoTo window, batch rename... And many more things to come. Since this was built from scratch, a lot of time and enginering effort was put into building a solid base. I'm in a phase where adding new stuff is fairly frictionless, so it's gonna get a lot better in the coming months. That being said, it's only 3 years old, very young compared to other long time players. So, it's not comparable feature for feature, yet.

johny115 2y ago

okay ... - it's fast (great!) - it can't play videos in preview pane (very bad) or display some types of images (webp) - design is nice but there is too much padding in thumbnail view and no way to control it (not good) - it's super similar to Files - https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9nghp3dx8hdx?hl=en-US&gl=US https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9nghp3dx8hdx?hl=en-US&gl=U... , except that one can play videos and is more than 20x cheaper - price, the Files I mentioned cost $8.99, I'd never thought i'd dish out any money on file explorer but here we go, yours is faster and if the full release will perfect the areas i mentioned, id pay up to $19 for it ... now asking $200 for file explorer is just mad ... i am in B2B so I know pains of dev software, but if I see such price, Id just be giving imaginary thumbs up to people who pirate this instead, unless this has some crazy super powers and is meant for some very specific professionals for business (I don't see the use case), there is no justification for such price, even from point of view of maximum greed I highly doubt with such prices youd be squeezing the most revenue out of market you could, the yearly plan is more of a slap in a face, software without updates is useless, especially since its early in development and will see lot of basic polish in first few years if worked on .. i wouldn't buy it, but something along $49 for it wouldn't at least scream offensive ... id just look at that with disappointment and move on, even that would be basically asking for the price of AAA videogame, for minor improvement of utility in Windows - that said, good luck ... I saw lot of people here post what they use; i dont want to offend anyone, but seems devs don't have cells for visual taste, those don't compare with yours, but you seem to have the speed of those (sort of, once i opened folder with 4k images, it completely froze for a full minute, windows explorer wouldn't do that, so ... speed is good, but can't sacrifice reliability for it.)

davidjade 2y ago

I really like this and I think it is off to a good start. But I also think there will be interesting/hard corner cases (such as offline/reparse point files - I logged a request for that in Discord). I don't think it needs to cover every special case but that's because I don't really want to use it to be a Explorer replacement. I see it rather as a supplemental tool.

rkagerer 2y ago

Where does it store configuration info? (e.g. like the flag that you chose the "Standalone" option) Is there a forum, or something non-Discord where you can see community-answered tech questions previously asked (without having to log into anything)?

pkkm 2y ago

1.8 MB standalone executable! That's cool to see in an era of huge apps.

kapitanluffy 2y ago

Based from the previews in the website, all I can say is that this is awesome! It feels very inspired by Sublime Text! Even the low-tier license seems inspired by ST; you buy a license, use it forever but won't get updates Looking upfront, I know you will succeed on this. I remember way back there was a file manager who did the similar thing. It is very ST-inspired. It got all the hype given how "sleek" the application is. It even did an "open-source promise" thing. It was very promising at that time until the developer went.. not sure how to describe it but for the lack of a better term, "profit-focused". Ironically, it does make a profit; as stated on the website. That app is still around. Not sure if the dev is still active but the issue tracker is. Last I heard from the dev is a YT "tear down" video. I guess at the end of the day, the guy is a "business man" and would do his best to make money. I hope you stay focused on delivering a good product. Collaborate with your community and rest-assured, profits will follow. I dropped by your Discord. Ping me whenever!

dryanau 2y ago

I've been using this for a few days now, and while I love the speed, I have experienced a couple of glitches with the file list e.g. duplicate files/folders shown, files missing, especially after doing a bunch of move/copy operations. I would have expected hitting F5 to refresh the view but I had to close the application and open again (blazingly fast) to get a fresh view of the folder's contents. It happened in side-by-side view, if relevant. Presumably some bug in the caching mechanism, at the very least I would force F5/refresh to do a fresh query of the current folders' contents and display correctly.

wink 2y ago

As I see a lot of talk about people seemingly happy to pay for this, apparently because they think they will gain something out of it. Backstory: My main machine at home is Windows (for games) and all other computers I have used since about 2010 have had Linux or FreeBSD on them (unless employer provided). As I'm a bit of a distro and DE hopper it happened to me more than once than I couldn't remember how my current GUI file manager was called... simply because I hadn't started it for half a year or longer. (Since then I've installed thunar most of the time). And I find this so fascinating because I use the Windows Explorer all the time. So either I am simply doing different things on Linux (while working and coding in my spare time) - or I use the shell so much that I don't even think about using a GUI file manager, if I have a proper shell available (not a fan of WSL). I plan to switch to Linux even on my gaming PC this year, we'll see if it works out... Long story short: I am not averse to paying for good software (although I prefer it to be FLOSS and I contribute in a miniscule way by reporting bugs, sometimes fixing them) - but if I'm not on Windows I am not the target audience _at all_. And I find it kinda surprising. Anyway, I wish the author good luck.

Sweepi 2y ago

Quick questions/observations: 1. Is there a way to reassign/set keyboard shortcuts? 2. Is there a keyboard shortcut for opening the "hamburger/3-dots" menu? 3. In the "hamburger/3-dots" menu, there is an option the open a cmd shell, but there seems to be no shortcut for it. 4. While in "quick filter mode" the context menu key does not work (but the context menu does when using right mouse button) [1] In windows explorer and File Pilot, you can access the "breadcrumbs" bar with ALT+D. In Windows explorer you then can enter "cmd" to get a cmd shell at the current location. This does not work in File Pilot. [1] If this does work for other people: My keyboard does not have a context menu key, therefore I use the following AutoHotkeyScript to rebind F13 (labeled mute/unmute on the keycap) to "open context menu", which so far has work everywhere, but I still wanted to mention. F13::AppsKey return

nguyenkien 2y ago
Ctrl+Shift+P > cmd

rrgok 2y ago

Man..I've been evaluating Directory Opus these past days. I still did not try FilePilot. I was almost ready to buy Dopus, now I don't know. Can you opensource the GUI part? It would be really useful for other people that want to build these kind of apps.

mwcampbell 2y ago

Nice work. I noticed, though, that there's no accessibility for blind people or others who need assistive technology that uses the platform accessibility API. If you can accept a Rust dependency, here's my project for solving this problem: https://accesskit.dev/ https://accesskit.dev/ We do provide pre-compiled static libraries of the C binding, so you don't need to directly introduce Rust into your build process. I specifically kept immediate-mode toolkits in mind when designing AccessKit. Or if you'd rather just look at our code and implement the accessibility APIs yourself, that's cool too.

vjekoslav 2y ago
Hello! I can't promise anything on this topic yet, it's on my list, but it's fairly low priority right now. The program was written in C with no dependencies, so introducing a huge dependency like that isn't an option. But I appreciate the advice!
- mwcampbell 2y ago
  I'm curious, how did you conclude that AccessKit is a huge dependency? The binary size does vary by platform, with the Linux backend being especially large due to its use of a pure-Rust implementation of D-Bus. But the Windows x64 DLL is 268 KB, and the macOS x86-64 dylib is 437 KB stripped. The impact of the static library on your binary size will probably be about the same, or maybe a little less because most applications don't require all of the little setter and (especially) getter functions. I'm not happy with the size on Linux, but I think it's acceptable on Windows and macOS, given that accessibility is, in many contexts, a must-have.
  - vjekoslav 2y ago
    Sorry, I based this on your comment "If you can accept a Rust dependency". I haven't actually looked into it yet, but I'll check it out, thanks for sharing. However, I'd still prefer to go with my own solution, if possible, for tighter integration.

IYasha 2y ago

Lol. I've had dreadful feelings reading through comments - is windows explorer THAT BAD now? I'm still on 7 in native UI mode and blissfully unaware of terror MS have unleashed onto the world. And waiting for linux to become useful to switch.

vjekoslav 2y ago
File Explorer on Windows 7, and Windows 7 in general, provided a far better (and faster) user experience. It's been downhill since then.