File Pilot: A file explorer built for speed with a modern, robust interface | Hacker News Reader

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

filepilot.tech

331 pointsvjekoslav221 comments

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

[2]: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=I1K3IkOlaVw

[3]: https://fman.io/blog/

Hey, thanks! Yes, I know about Fman. I’ve tried pretty much all file explorers on Windows, a fair number on Linux, and fewer on macOS. I watched that video a couple of years ago, it had some nice insights. Thanks for sharing that.

I've been talking about File Pilot since the early days of the project, so I managed to build a following on Twitter and Discord, along with a decent number of email subscribers. I'm hoping that'll be enough to spread the word.

I'm sorry Fman didn't work out for you as a business. But truth be told, you need to deliver something exceptional to compete with established players. While I don't see other file explorer alternatives as direct competition, I do think File Pilot will bring a breath of fresh air. We'll see how it goes!

Hm, are you hinting that fman was not exceptional at its time? If yes, then I disagree.

That's not exceptional IMHO. It's a good effort, but not exceptional. Exceptional apps scream "wow" and are feature rich, with great UI/UX. Example of exceptional apps are Obsidian, TablePlus, Transmit (by panic), Sublime Text, VSCode. File Pilot has that "wow" factor and the features.

fman is still exceptional.

Without your OpenSource Promise Scam you wouldn't have earned nearly as much with fman.

Holy heck! I remember fman, and it was amazing! Literally the only file manager I used that could hold a candle to Total Commander. I remember everyone hating on it on linux forums, because it wasn't open source, despite nothing in the linux world coming close.

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?

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=43099230

* 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.

Did you experiment with different pricing? I wonder if slashing the price significantly would boost sales so much that it becomes viable a product.

> But I regret spending so much time on it

Just curious, what aspects do you regret?

Wow, after so many useless bloated Electron based applications over the years, this is like a breath of fresh air. This is so fast, lightweight, portable, and uses only 17 MB of memory with XL icons of over 10k photos. Very impressive. If only more developers would quit their laziness and make such software again.

Totally agree! Let's make a real joy such like this one. I feel a great sense of satisfaction and excitement watching the File Pilot development process.

Really impressive. Basically has everything from Windows 11 Explorer without being a bloated POS.

Only thing I'd love is to be able to go bigger on the preview thumbnails. It's limited itself to the Windows sizes.

What GUI framework did they use for this?

This is all I found:

"It's written in C and has custom OpenGL renderer."

https://filepilot.handmade.network/

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 ; Windows file system encoding is annoying because it's UTF-16.

This is always, always the tradeoff with custom UIs. The edge cases eat you alive.

I'm sorry, as I don't know.

I mean, I don't even know what you use to write "windows" applications anymore.

But are the stock frameworks that slow to justify rewriting the toolkit? I am under the impression that writing GUI toolkits was Hard.

Are there plans to make this cross platform?

It was written from scratch with a custom OpenGL renderer (a DirectX port is in progress for Windows) and a custom IMGUI layer on top.

You mean all those complex UI stuff code is written in immediate GUI? How maintainable/readable is the resulting code?

Way more maintainable than anything from MS that I'd have to deal with.

How about the CPU usage? Running a main loop at 60hz for a file manager sounds bit overkill.

Agree about the MS offerings. That's why I use cross-platform frameworks (wx, qt) even for the Win-only apps.

Give the demo a try. I compared the CPU usage to the win10 file explorer, and they look identical (both are minuscule); it's super impressive.

How is the support for CJK and insane Unicode like emoji surrogates? Dealing with some of those edge cases can break a man.

Made it himself

This x100000000.

I am probably repeating your comment in my sleep, word for word.

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/ 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/ over decades and is supported by the open source alternative implementation https://doublecmd.sourceforge.io/

Any roadmap that has some of this on the list? [edited spelling]

Thanks for the cool work!

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.

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 does this well with a slider in settings.

I'll check it out, thanks!

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!

Between all two-panel clones of the Norton Commander [1] FAR [2] is by far the best of the bunch /rimshot.

Very keyboard-oriented, extremely capable, super fast, open source with a vast plug-in library. A console app on top of that and it looks like the original. What's not to like.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norton_Commander

[2] https://www.farmanager.com/

on windows I was partial to Saladin https://saladin.mimec.org/

This is eye opening to me. I have been swearing by Directory Opus for years, but I was also under the misguided impression that most Norton Commander clones were long gone. Love seeing so many alternatives, I’ll have to go check the, out.

Also still use Total Commander, a software now in development for > 30 years. Even paid way more for continuing my CrossOver subscription than in TC license fees over the years.

If there's a portable version of this I can run on my work computer, I will! (stand-alone version, it's so fast!)

The Windows built-in File Explorer is godawfully slow. Like, slower than I remember it being in the late 90's. Motivation-sappingly slow. But I think it's because my work computer has it's inescapable synchronisation to OneDrive, and so every folder and every file it has to scan for a thumbnail or whatever, waits for it's data from OneDrive like a happy little idiot.

Funnily enough, navigating a remote directory on my NAS from my home Linux desktop is blazingly fast as if the files are local.

Windows or the Corporate Environment, or the combination of the two, is creating so much overhead that it feels like going back in time 25+ years.

Also company computer: Built-in file explorer sometimes takes 3 seconds to display a thumbnail for a 10KB png I saved to a folder from my editor. I just don't get it. We also have OneDrive. Don't shoot the messenger alright but it really makes me want to punch the monitor.

People are gushing about a file explorer, what? Looks like there is a plan to force user's to pay for a subscription to there own local files. My $90 wallmart phone and hinky fdroid software is faster than than what is bieng described on current windopes editions. what happened? since my last windoze experience? linux on the laptop is ok, ancient laptop, cheap phone, that play nice with each other, random free sofware, does what it says on the label and more. Obviously my set up is not goung to work in a professional business environment, but then for professional users, hunting around for fixes to inadequate OS features, should be a thing of the past. tedious and somewhat embarassing that things are so horrible, now, still, again

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.

There seems to be one, at least the "installer" asks you if you want to install or have a portable installation.

OneDrive is an abomination. I never asked for it on my computer. It is infuriating that MS apps default to saving to it.

It is portable by default, no need to install anything, just run the main and only exe.

I’m not sure if this is really the right place to ask, but it’s close enough so I’ll ask anyway - why are there no apparent file explorers that allow simultaneous “multi depth” viewing? For example, if Folder A contains only Subfolders B and C which are both empty, why are there no explorers that show eg 2 boxes called ‘B’ and ‘C’ inside A’s icon/view? If a directly has dozens of empty folders, and 2 subfolders have 1 file each, and another subfolder has 20 files and takes 99% of space, why is there no intuitive way to quickly find the large folder?

The closest is probably how windows shows previews on desktop but that is only one level deep, if there are empty subfolders it doesn’t help.

Id imagine someone at Plan9 or WebOS or BeOS or some archaic software/OS developer had surely thought of this and made something. Yet all “top” windows file explorers are completely “flat” and don’t show any depth.

It's not a file explorer so not exactly what you're looking for, but WizTree is good for finding out which folder contains the large files. It's like WinDirStat but much faster.

Thanks, I’m familiar with WizTree but to the best of knowledge it’s meant more to find what’s taking space, rather than navigating between folders. I’m not sure how practical it would be as a replacement of file explorer, for example I think it defaults to mapping out the whole drive (rather than a specific folder). But thanks anyway for the suggestion!

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.

I still use and can recommend Sequoia (or SequoiaView?) program from early 2000s to map all directories by size. VERY useful to know what to clean.

As for exlorer... The only drawback to your request is, obviously, the need for recursive FS scan, which is expensive. That is why it is not in-built in default file explorer functionality. But XnView, for example, optionally shows brief content of directories (e.g. 4 mini-thumbs over a directory icon).

Sounds interesting, I use to use a tool that showed a drives or folders content by file size. Larger files being larger boxes.

It definitely seems useful to have a view where folders are simply boxes with ---names--- in their top border. A folder could also be a simple outline with its name in front of the file names.

Something like this

https://img.go-here.nl/folder-view.png

Thank you, that’s a nice photo and shows something very close to what I’m thinking about! (Albeit hopefully a little less barebones haha)

Could you share the name of the software it is/was, or perhaps a link?

There is no software, I just make a drawing to see what I'm thinking. Ideas fail surprisingly often in the process. For example, here the boxes somewhat conflict with lining up the text and the line spacing. Some background color (rather than outlines) could better visualize the nesting and use less space. I think a folder that contains only one file should look almost exactly like the file was in the parent folder.

If the folder name is long it should probably fail back on the normal tree view rather than putting it in front of the files in the box. But then you get a mix of solutions which is undesirable.

I'm afraid people are to used to the traditional tree view. It is a surprisingly good solution now that I've bothered to think about it.

Folders should probably just have a value in the size column and the screens are large enough to have a column for the number of files. (the pilot does F:21 S:123) Empty folder and file font colors can be slightly translucent.

SpaceMonger

I used that since Win95.

Directory Opus has a "flat tree" view (as well as a plain "flat" view): https://imgur.com/3uqW8it

Directory Opus can also calculate & display the sizes of folders including all child content. (The calculation is nearly instant if Everything integration is enabled.)

Directory Opus lets you see this by enabling relative size bars in file lister views: https://resource.dopus.com/t/calculate-folder-sizes-automati...

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

What is the deal with MacOS file dialogs? A couple days ago I was trying to open a project in Cursor, and I click on "home" and my name, and then it has the directories grouped by year created. So I type in the search box, but it's now searching some other context, like the whole system or something? I don't even have tons of files/directories in my home directory "ls | wc -l" gives 36.

It's like they designed it while watching High Fidelity: "I sorted my albums autobiographically. So if I'm looking for <this album> I have to remember that it's under albums I bought for a girl but ended up not giving to her." "That sounds like a great idea!"

> then it has the directories grouped by year created

That's a setting you set.

Right click on empty space > uncheck "Use groups"

Or in that context menu, select "Show View Options" and customize it to your liking. My liking is "Group by kind" (folders to the top) then "Sort by name"

If you start searching, I think it defaults to scope "This Mac". That's probably right for most cases. If you want to open a Word doc named Fnord, you'd kind of hope Finder would... find it... wherever it was. But you can also click next to "This Mac" to switch it the context of the directory you're in.

Also, cmd-shift-G (the Finder shortcut for "Go to Folder...") will let you start typing a path.

> If you start searching, I think it defaults to scope "This Mac".

Correct, and it's the first setting I change.

Finder > Settings > Advanced > When performing a search: "Search the Current Folder"

Sounds like it was sorted by “most recent” (not the column, but the view mode).

That said the Open dialog is a sad sack stand in for even the flawed Finder. 20 year Mac user here: I developed the muscle memory to just have a Finder window open to the file I want so I can drag and drop from that into the Open dialog.

Thanks everyone, these pointers were really helpful. At one time I think I set it to "most recent" and forgot about it, since I'm not using the finder a whole lot. I hadn't even thought about going into settings, so I went there and did some tweaks, including defaulting to searching within folder by default, and changing some locations that it defaults to, which I think will really help.

If everything goes well with Windows and the project becomes financially stable, a macOS version is planned.

Mac user tend to buy premium apps more, so you should just made for mac anyway.

It does seem like there are more well made, premium apps on Mac. I’ve always been jealous. Eventually a clone is made that supports Windows, but it always seems a bit worse.

There are a few good Finder alternatives for macOS, including Path Finder, ForkLift, Commander One, and Double Commander (FOSS).

I ended up with ForkLift after much trial and error. Commander One was nice. Double Commander is also great but not "native" on Mac. Path Finder is super powerful but has a rep for being overcomplicated and also crashy, but I can't personally vouch because it wasn't quite what I was looking for anyway.

Forklift is the one I settled on as well. I had the experience you describe with Path Finder before and finally I gave up.

Forklift has a couple of things that annoy me daily though. Often I will have to refresh a pane to see a file I know has recently been added. Eg in downloads. I may even have navigated to downloads after the download finished and it's still not visible until I refresh.

The other is that it doesn't reuse existing tabs if I "reveal in finder" or whatever, so after a while there's a million tabs open, most pointing to the same directory.

Oof. Those hit close to home for me, too.

also, https://marta.sh/

Path Finder went to a subscription-only model, no way to outright purchase a license sadly.

The quality of Path Finder went downhill many years ago as well.

On macOS my daily driver is Nimble Commander (https://magnumbytes.com/). Super fast, powerful and inspired by Total Commander. It used to be paid but now is free and open source so give it a try. It deserves to be better known.

I've found this article recently: https://www.xda-developers.com/4-finder-alternatives-on-maco...

Hahaha, that's great. Halfway down this article, there's a link to an old article on File Pilot.

I don't think it's technically possible to even replace Finder. If you type "open ." in terminal, it will open in Finder.

There is not an optional "set this as default" like browsers. Something we should really push Apple to do. Finder is trash.

It’s possible to get pretty close. For example, Forklift’s instructions (go to https://binarynights.com/manual, search for “Default File Viewer”) nearly replaces it, except you still have a Finder icon in the dock.

Is it not possible to alias the open command?

ForkLift is really good.

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

It does not integrate with Everything. It's already blazingly fast with the regular WinAPI for indexing. However, MFT indexing (which Everything uses) will be added as built-in support in the near future. It will be an opt-in option for users.

There are a couple of reasons why I didn't want to make MFT the default.

a) It requires admin access.

b) It's NTFS specific, which means you need to write different logic for other file systems anyway.

c) It's not officially documented or supported by Microsoft. It was reverse-engineered.

There is "blazingly fast" where you also have to only include SSDs, still see your root drive taking seconds to populate data for, and still requiring admin for the whole app with those ugly underlines otherwise..

And then there is literally instant, for literally everything, while the app itself is in normal mode and thus preserves the non-admin benefits.

a) Not for the app, only for Everything

b) Those other file systems could also be indexed by Everything (though via a slower mechanism). Also given the primacy of NTFS, I'd definitely trade the ability to have folder sizes for drives I rarely use for the instant calculations on drives I use all the time

c) Good. Waiting for MS docs could mean a few more decades of wasted potential

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.

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.

Thank you!

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.

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.

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.

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.

SVN is used in the movies industry as far as I can remember. Especially 3d artists use this for synchronizing their models.

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.

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.

Would you recommend any app to "troubleshoot" these delays? Maybe a tool that helps seeing which extensions take long to load?

ShellExView can be used to track down slow extensions (but it doesn't offer runtime performance numbers):

https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/shexview.html

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

I still have the XTree keyboard shortcuts embedded in my muscle memory.

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)?

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/

Files looks great but it has performance issues and occasional crashes when I tried it out a few months ago. When going into subfolders, there is a very noticeable subsecond lag which I don’t get from native Explorer. For all complaints of lack of features that Windows File Explorer gets, it’s still a very respectable native GUI app for being Windows’ most used program!

It's usable most of the time until it isn't. Far to often I wonder what they were thinking making things. Say, where is the recycle bin? If I could switch to the windows 95 explorer I would do it immediately.

Yeah I had to give up on Files because of the performance too. I'm glad this exists.

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?

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.

Looking at PowerToys, they would probably turn it into a WinUI slug. I wonder what hardware the WinUi devs run it on.

It's an open possibility :)

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.

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

Two completely unrelated products.

Dired, the file manager that comes in Emacs, is 'completely unrelated' to a file manager named File Pilot?

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.

You do realise that Emacs runs in Windows?

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.

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"

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.

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

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.

PDF previews are not supported yet, but they are planned.

Awesome! Look forward to testing it more when pdf previews are added.

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.

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.

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!

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

Ctrl+Shift+P > cmd

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.

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.

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). But yeah, I have to admit that the application looks as dated as the website...

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.

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.

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.

I'm a long time Directory Opus (dopus) user which costs around 50 US$. Dopus is more extendible but probably not as fast. Seems like a reasonable price to me. When you deal with a LOT of files like I do as a game dev it pays for itself pretty quickly.

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/ 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.

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!

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.

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.

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!

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.

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

Please make a mac version.

I will.

I will pay for it!

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

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.

> 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.

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

Proof that the answer to the problem of evil is "Yeah, so what?"

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.

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

> 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.

To be honest I'm just burn out after 8 hours of coding for work, to do even more coding after.

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.

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

> 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.

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)

> 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?

File Pilot supports explorer extensions... There's an actual animation showing it on the website. What do you mean by "limiting the feature set"?

I don't know if Windows Explorer has regressed since Vista, but back then I remember it doing everything I wanted and more, down to viewing and editing MP3 and JPG metadata in some panel, filtering, grouping, smart searches, etc.

What else do you need from it?

I don't know the state now because I've since switched to macOS, which has Finder, an absolute toy in comparison (other than QuickLook and Column View)

> It's good now

Are you able to clarify what it does better now than it did 10, 15, 20 years ago?

I've been using a free file explorer called Q-Dir (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.

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.

Please make a linux version!

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

Are you running it inside a VM or Wine?

Nope, just the installer, win11

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.

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

Yeah and its $40 per year it seems. While its good that you can continue using your version after that it does seem just a little much. I'm not sure I even want to try it now because I don't want to like it and then decide I can't afford it. I'm not against yearly license cost at all, I think that it can be hard for software companies to make something good without it. But for a new software it seems just a tad high. And I guess it will seem even more depending on where you live.

It's not "per year". It's your good old conventinal pricing, in disguise.

You buy Xyz 2002, you get to keep Xyz 2002 and get some updates. When new and shiny Xyz 2004 comes out, you look at the spec and decide if new features worth the upgrade cost.

Same here, except improvements are gradual and not packaged into yearly releases.

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.

For something you use everyday multiple times per day?

Good software costs money.

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.

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.

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

The top of the homepage says File Pilot was made from scratch (so I'd expect inherently less technical debt than something that's been around since the 90's). Comparing its screenshots to Directory Opus, it looks less cluttered, or at least slightly different. The interface looks like it adheres to the Windows 11 design style a little more, versus Directory Opus's screenshots looking like Windows 8-10.

If I used Windows regularly, I'd probably appreciate having another option, just as I appreciate (and even take for granted) the ability to switch between various options on Linux.

On the other hand, 35 years of cruft also represents 35 years of accumulated knowledge about what people want from a file manager. So one should not dismiss Directory Opus based upon a few screenshots.

Fresh blood is certainly a good thing though. I am just arguing that we should not dismiss something based upon its age or cosmetics.

(Directory Opus is one of the few things that I miss while using Linux.)

In addition to Directory Opus, I also miss https://www.xyplorer.com/ on Windows since I’m on Linux.

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.

FP has been mostly tested and improved for mapped network drives, as the focus has been, and still is, on providing a very solid local experience.

Direct network access (and better integration with NAS) will be added in the near future.

I imagine it's because the UI may not be portable to Windows

Linux basically has a pile of dogpoo and now with wayland still blocking the ability to have dockable windows, good luck. Lol

I'm pretty happy with the kde file manager on wayland personally

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

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.

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 :(

Unfortunately, I only support Latin and Cyrillic for now. But full unicode support will come in the future.

Can't wait to replace my explorer with this, hope the support will come soon

Back when I used to torment myself with Windows, I used to use Zabkat Xplorer². https://www.zabkat.com/

It looks old skool now it did its job well.

Saladin was a great dual pane navigator https://saladin.mimec.org

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?

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.

Is this cross platform or is it targeted at a particular filesystem? I skimmed the site but couldn't find any info. The FAQ is full of pricing minutiae but nothing about what platforms are supported?

It will come to other OSes in time. The Windows platform layer is decoupled from everything else, such as rendering and UI, so I only need to write platform-specific code for other OSes.

Windows only for now, other OS coming soon

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?

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.

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?

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. :)

I did try, and I did not find the option whether to separate between file and folders, so I will look more carefully.

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

Dolphin is available for Windows[0].

[0]: https://cdn.kde.org/ci-builds/system/dolphin/master/windows/

It's likely not tested very well, but in principle you can build and run Dolphin on Windows.

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

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.

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.

Been waiting for this to be released. Thanks.

Feedback: Show complete file name in thumbnail view. Currently its replaced with ...

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.

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

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

Yes, proper localization will be probably be included in first official V1 version.

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

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.

I join the mailing-list but I only wanted was an email when the beta is over.

It looks stunning. Well done!

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

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

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

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

KDE Dolphin.

Double commander?

Not really, linux doesn't really have a good file manager. Dolphin probably gets you closest. I'd like to scratch the itch, but I don't have time to start such a project at the moment.

Really, dolphin is best? Using Dolphin on Nobara right now, and the pinned items in the left pane are not there in the systems "file open" dialog, the dialog does not even have breadcrumbs(!!). Or am I holding it wrong?

You have the option of what applications will show the pin. Right click on an item and you can choose if this is global or app-specific (in this case dolphin, but you can indeed pin per app!).

The file open dialog is likely the "portal", which works securely across sandboxed applications. Every Linux does have a portal implementation.

In KDE this portal has quite some features, but it could be that some are not available, possibly spec-related or security concern. You can look in the settings though.

EDIT: pinned items are available in the desktop-portal. I have not looked into breadcrumbs, but I like the location bar to be editable straight away anyways.

Might be https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=406450 as in https://bugsfiles.kde.org/attachment.cgi?id=158755

tl;dr There's a ‘filename’ version and a ‘URL’ version of the dialog. Some things are incorrectly missing from the ‘filename’ version because they're internally implemented using URLs.

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.

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=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.)

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