Total Commander is a file manager that no longer requires any presentation. It is, from many points of view, the best. The functions mentioned in the other programs are also found in Total Commander.
Beyond the standard features, its functionality can extend far beyond standard boundaries. And this is done with the help of plugins. If you search the internet for a description for Total Commander, you will most often find it a file manager. Of course, this description is simplistic, because as you will see, it can do much more than that. To install this program you have a lot of sites where you can download the installation kit. The Total Commander installation kit has a size of 2.05 MB, so even those with a very fast internet connection will not be able to download it in a reasonable time. The entire installed program also has very little space – about 4 MB.
1. After downloading the installation kit, all you have to do is double-click and the installation process will start. You will be asked to select the language for the program menu.
2. The interface of this program is totally different from that provided by Windows Explorer, having two windows side by side. This approach will be known to those who worked in Norton Commander. Each of the two windows can be used separately to access files.
3. What is very useful in using two windows is that this greatly facilitates the copying or moving of files from one location to another on the hard disk. Total Commander offers total freedom of movement because in the two windows you can work on two different partitions or, for example, in one window you can access a USB drive and on the other one the files on a DVD.
4. For those passionate about programming, Total Commander has a feature they will find extremely useful. At the bottom, there is a command line where you can run programs that need to receive certain user parameters.
5. What seemed to be extremely interesting to this program is how it treats the work with the archives. Basically, they can be used as regular folders: Double-click on them and immediately display the content. More beautiful is that using the Search function, Total Commander will also search inside the archives. And it will not only look inside archives by file names, but you can even search for text within the files contained in the archives. The archive formats supported are: zip, arj, lha, rar, uc2, tar, gz, cab, needles.
6. Thanks to the two windows it benefits from, Total Commander makes copying or moving files from one place to another extremely easy. It has dedicated buttons: F5 for copy and F6 for a move.
7. If you are in the middle of a file copy and want to do something else, you can pause copying and then resume the operation from where it is left. This option seems to me to be a major advantage over the Windows Explorer competitor who will have to resume the entire task from the beginning.
8. Another major advantage that Total Commander has to Windows Explorer is the search time. We did a small experiment in which we searched within a partition for the same file with two different instances, both with Total Commander and with Windows Explorer in parallel. What I noticed was that the program crashed like the Windows Explorer, which, when Total Commander finished searching, had only found the first instance of the file. The file was an audio file, and when searching with Windows Explorer, I explicitly mentioned that it had to look for such a file type.
9. To connect to an FTP server, you will find an FTP button in the top menu and then you will need to enter the server address with the user and password, if applicable. The FTP server will appear in one of the two windows as if it were a local partition.
10. Total Commander comes in two versions: one on 16 bits and one on 32 bits. In any of the 32-bit variants, you’ll be able to drag & drop from and to Windows Explorer or Desktop, you’ll be able to send the deleted files to the Recycle Bin and you’ll be able to get the same right-click menu on the files.
11. A lot of other features are still available, such as:
a. Tree, which puts the files in a tree structure
b. Synchronize Dirs, which compares two directories with their subdirectories and copies newer files from one to the other, or a comparison function that can compare the contents of two text files.