Geez budz45, despite your enthusiasm, I respectfully disagree. That's quite a bit of hyperbole, there.
XYplorer is highly configurable and has many useful UI tweaks and options. I like the undo functionality, for instance. The tabbed file preview/info panel is really great. The new scripting capability finally catches XYplorer up with SpeedCommander, Dopus, and Salamander, among others.
But
Total Commander is so much more powerful overall, there is really no comparison!
Here's why: TC has an
open architecture that supports four types of 3rd-party plugins:
The TC developer has published APIs and example code for these plugin types and many (many, including even me!) users have written to the specification to allow TC to work with virtually any file system, see into any document, and integrate everything into one virtually seamless tool.
As just one example of the power of TC's open architecture: consider the range of possible file
metadata and what a user might wish to do with it.
Yes XYplorer does display a few metadata columns also available in Explorer (right click on a column header and select "Show columns..." to see XYplorer's limited selection). But that's it! It makes no further use of that data beyond passive display and is limited to the metadata that is hard coded into it by the developers.
In TC, file system metadata is collected/accessed via internal and external content ("*.wdx") plugins. For instance, plug-ins enable TC to display all Explorer metadata as columns in the file panels. But TC will also populate the columns with any additional values recoverable or created by any WDX plugin. There are plugins to extract media tags, extract image data from EXIF or XMP, perform calculations, generate conditional values, reformat other metadata... the list goes on and on. Someone wrote a metadata plugin that will populate each column using different plugins according to user-defined file masks... (a "metadata-metadata" plug-in). Another developer wrote a plugin to link to user-defined VBScripts to generate the values to display in a column.
Not only that, the
piece de resistance, TC integrates any and all file metadata available to it
everywhere else in the UI that a user might conceivably want to use it: in filter definitions, selection definitions, search definitions, renaming rules, attribute management, thumbnail labels...
And that doesn't even address the other, equally powerful, plugin types. Scroll through those TC plugin pages (see links, above) a little bit. The vast numbers of TC plug-ins speak for themselves. And that is just one site!
At first glance, indeed, TC does look a bit "old school", it misses scripting, has no undo, and some file managers have more flexible GUIs in some ways, but if you really need to "get things done", TC has absolutely
no peers. I've tried them all.
