Why Directory Opus 10 is the king of file browsers

Most of the features you list are available by default in Nautilus. For example, I can hit F3 to have dual panes in Nautilus, view FTP and network drives like normal directories, go into and view and move around stuff between archives and folders without extracting, preview a large array of file types, documents, and media quickly, and have bookmarked directories and files on the side to be quickly accessible.

Nautilus is pretty customizable with hotkeys, ways to interact with not only Git but other VCS-es through plugins or otherwise. I appreciate you introducing Directory Opus though, I'll definitely take it for a spin on my Windows boxes.

I havent tried Directory Opus since version 6 as I found it too slow with the extra bells and whistles, maybe time to try it I guess.

I can however vouch for xplorer^2, both feature and speed-wise which is my default file explorer in windows.

Your review feels a bit like an affiliate sales letter. In case this is an affiliate product, you should disclose that.

On a substantive level, I think all file managers should have tagging, smartly filtered collections (a la itunes "smart folders", but more powerful), and built-in full-text search. On top of that, a rules engine for copying/moving around files (e.g. move all downloaded pdf's older than 15 days to the trash). Ideally, this stuff would be higher level than the file-system, thus allowing cross-platform use of this system.

As someone who currently has 8 explorer windows open and is often frustrated with how unwieldy it is to work with, I have to say I'm impressed and tempted to purchase this thing. I was just to the point of starting to set up Cygwin with a bunch of alias and symlink entries to streamline my file operations. Now I'm torn between continuing that path and buying this thing. I think the dual panes and the tabs would solve many of the problems I currently have with explorer.

I always find myself put off articles that use "M$" to refer to Microsoft.

88 bucks for a file browser still sounds extremely exorbitant though. Explorer++ is free and does at least whatever it is supposed to do decently..

"programmed in low level c++" no less!

How does this compare to Total Commander?