Windows Explorer, the default file manager in Windows. It gets the job done, but it leaves a
lot to be desired. I mean it only took almost 40 years to get tabbed windows. But what if I told
you there are actually third party alternatives to Windows Explorer you can use instead,
and even set them as the default file manager. In fact that’s what I’ve done for the past 6 months,
and several of you have noticed it in my videos and asked what I’m using,
so I figured I’d make a video about it. And no this is not sponsored at all,
if a video is sponsored I'm always going to make that clear, but people always ask anyway.
So. The program I’m using is called “Directory Opus”. It’s extremely customizable but also can be
overwhelming at first, because there are so many freakin settings. But you can customize basically
everything about it. I’ll show you a bunch more later, but for just one example, I wrote a little
script that lets me automatically create backups of any selected file at the push of a button. And
plenty of people have written their own custom scripts too you can find on the official forum.
All of these toolbars are customizable too, I chose which buttons to put on them and
how to arrange them. In fact what you see here is heavily modified from the default layout,
which looks like this. I basically changed it to look as close to the standard Windows
Explorer as possible just to satisfy my muscle memory, but then augment it with
all the extra buttons and tools you see. And this is just the tip of the iceberg,
I’m probably using about 2% of the overall capabilities. For starters as an example, a big
benefit is being able to have multiple directory windows, or “listers” they’re called, open at a
time like this. But I’ll try to show as many of the other best features in my opinion in a second.
Now I do need to point out that Directory Opus isn’t free. It’s 89 Australian dollars,
which right now is about 60 US Dollars. However there is a 60 day free trial so you can try it
out. Also there are two versions, lite and pro, but for full customization you’d need
the pro version, that’s what I have. But this is definitely a case of you get what you pay for.
So to best demonstrate more of the capabilities, I guess I may as well just show you a whole bunch
of my favorite features back to back. Now you already see that you can have multiple tabs,
but one feature that’s really useful is you can save a set of open tabs
as a “Tab Group” and reopen them whenever you want. So when I’m working on a video,
I just click my “Video Production” shortcut and it will open all the normal folders I use,
like with graphics, backgrounds, stock videos, that sort of thing.
Another cool feature is if I accidentally close a tab, I added a keyboard shortcut to re-open it,
and set it to be the same keyboard shortcut for re-opening tabs in Chrome, Ctrl + Shift + T,
since that’s what I’m used to. Also you know how sometimes you go to enter a folder or
change a file and Windows hits you with a “permission denied” error? Usually it gives
you the option to escalate and continue, but a lot of times you need to access multiple folders
and it can be annoying to keep doing it. So I added a button to a toolbar to automatically
escalate the file manager window to admin to avoid all that if necessary.
Also down here at the bottom are a bunch of other really cool stuff. Like this filter box, which is
easily one of my favorite things. If you’re in a folder with a whole bunch of stuff and you want
to find a file, you can just start typing, and it will instantly start filtering to only show
the files and folders that match that. Or if you need to do a regular search, there is a search
box for that too, and yes it’s way better than the crappy search in regular Windows Explorer.
In this Properties menu are more useful commands. Just clicking properties brings
up the usual properties window. And ‘attributes’ lets you mess around with,
well attributes, like whether a file or folder is hidden, compressed, read-only,
and creation and modified times. But I really like these two. ‘Touch Modified Date’ lets you change
the modified date to the current time, without having to edit the file. And this other one,
‘Modified Date from Created’, I actually made this button myself with a command. This is for when you
have some file that for some reason Windows thinks was modified, but it wasn’t, so if you’re trying
to sort by files by modified date, they kind of mess things up. So what this does is change the
modified date back to the same as the ‘created’ date and time, which usually does stay correct.
To add buttons to toolbars like that, you can right click any toolbar and click ‘Customize’
to go into customize mode. Then you can drag buttons and toolbars around,
but you also get this new Window that comes up. Here you can enable and disable existing toolbars,
or make new ones, and in the “commands” tab are all the built in commands and tools,
but going over all these would take all day. If you want to make a button with a custom command,
you can copy and paste an existing button and use that as a starting point and modify it,
or you can make a new one from scratch. Again I’m not going to really go over how to do this,
but you can pretty much get it to do anything. Fortunately the button I wanted was really simple,
so all that one does is use the command to set attribute, then it sets modified equal to created.
And this other one which came built in, just sets the modified variable to ‘now’. Of course
the tricky part is looking up what the commands and variable names are, but that’s all in the
documentation. Oh and you can also customize how a button looks, like choosing the icon,
or choose to not show one, change the label, where the label shows, that sort of thing.
Now I already showed you my backup file button, but this is an example of a way
more complicated command. You can see I wrote a whole script in JScript for
that one. And I’ll put a link to that in the description if you want to add it yourself.
At the bottom right, I put some buttons to change the viewing mode if I want. So
details and thumbnails are self-explanatory, but I did make it so if it’s in the thumbnail view,
this size slider appears, which makes it easier to expand images without having to open them all the
way. Then the Thumb & Detail view is like a hybrid of the other two if the situation calls for that.
We’re not quite done yet down here though. At the very bottom, this isn’t a toolbar but a
status bar, and it does show various info based on your preferences. You’ll notice it has this thing
saying ‘5 hidden’, and if I click that, it reveals any hidden files or folders in the directory.
This is really nice because I always want to know if a directory has hidden stuff in it,
but also those folders often clutter stuff up. In regular Windows Explorer,
you don’t really have a choice, if you want to know about hidden folders, you have to keep
them turned on. The status bar also has some stuff like how many files and folders you have selected,
and their size out of the total. But speaking of folder size, you’ll notice I have a column for it,
but it doesn’t show anything. Which takes us to the toolbars at the top right.
I have this button here called ‘Get Sizes’, which like it says, fetches the total size of
the folders and sub-folders and everything in them, which then shows in the size column and
in the status bar. Theoretically you could have it just automatically do that every
time without the button, but if there are a bunch of sub-folders and files,
it takes some time. So it’s more practical to just get the info only when you need it.
This ‘toggle flat view’ button really comes in handy sometimes. When you press it,
it shows every file in every folder and sub folder within the current directory, all at once.
One example for this is if you’re looking for a certain file in a directory, but you don’t know
what it’s called so you can’t search for it, but maybe you know that it’s a recently edited file,
for example. So you could just flatten the view, and sort by modified date and look for it. Or
maybe you just want to get rid of the folder structure and copy everything into a single
directory, so you can flatten the view, select and copy everything, and then paste it where
you want. It’s one of those things where you don’t really know what it’s used for until you need it.
At the very top right there’s mostly a bunch of stuff for changing the layout
and view. I can split the window top to bottom, left to right,
toggle the metadata pane for selected files, or the viewer pane like for images.
And on the left I kept it pretty simple with just buttons for new folder, undo,
and refresh. Above it is the main menu bar, and yes you can customize that too.
I removed a few of the default menus in favor of just these. I won’t go through everything,
a lot of it is self explanatory if you want to pause and read though.
The tools menu has some cool stuff though. For example, you can synchronize folders in
a few different ways, whether it syncs them in both directions so they’re exactly the same,
or whether you want it to be a one-way sync. Or you can just compare two
folders with the ‘compare’ option, without actually synchronizing them.
There’s also even a file log feature to show actions you’ve taken,
like maybe if you accidentally deleted a file, but you're not sure which one,
you can just look at it. It doesn’t show everything by default,
but you can go into the ‘logging’ settings to choose exactly what it keeps track of.
Oh and this folder tree all the way on the left is also customizable of
course. I chose the settings that makes it look close to regular explorer. But you
could also just put another vertical toolbar there if you want, you could
have it expand the tree as you navigate through directories, all sorts of stuff.
Of course I can’t forget to talk about the actual main part of the window. This is
called the 'lister' because it lists the files You can obviously choose what columns to show,
I just have the usual basic ones from Windows Explorer here. But there are a bunch of other
cool ones you can add, like this ‘status’ column, where you can select a file or folder or multiple,
and add a little status icons to them, or multiple statuses at once. You can also
highlight certain files with a color using the 'Set Label' option in the context menu.
Another column that can come in handy is this one, that shows the hashes of all the files.
This one was actually a script someone made on the user forums, it wasn’t even built in. I don’t
keep it on all the time just to save processing power, but it’s there if I need it. And actually
I made a super simple column myself, the ‘blank spacer column’. It doesn’t actually do anything,
I just didn’t like how close the files were to the left edge of the window,
so I made a script for an empty column you can resize to add as a spacer wherever you want. Oh
and I should also mention you can even enable manual sorting inside folders if you want. And
to save any configuration you set up in a folder, you can just save that as a ‘format’ so it sticks.
So that pretty much covers everything you see here, but that really doesn’t even scratch
the surface. In the preferences window is where you can change almost every setting
imaginable. For visual settings, there’s fonts colors and sizes for different places,
as well as changing the color of all the parts of the window,
which is how I made my theme look all white like regular explorer. You can also change
any of the icons, like I did with these navigation buttons, they weren’t standard,
they were in this Metro Black icon pack someone made, which I got from the forum too.
As you’d expect, it would take all day to go through all these settings, and it’s not
just visual stuff in here, it’s everything. File operations, folder options, folder tabs, launch
options, just a ton. Now if you decide to get Directory Opus and want your layout and everything
to look just like mine, what I’ll do is upload a zip file with the theme and some config files,
plus instructions on how to do that. That link will be in the description. Basically you’ll
just first have to import the theme which will deal with all the colors and icons and stuff, and
there will also be some files that you just have to copy into the Directory Opus AppData folder,
and that will get all the preferences how I have them. That way it will put all the toolbars and
stuff in the right place, as well as those custom scripts I showed you. Now there is a feature to
backup and restore your whole configuration, so technically I could just post my whole backup
file, but I’m not sure what info it contains about my system so better safe than sorry.
So at this point you should have a pretty good idea about the capabilities of this program. Like
I said, I’ve been using it for months and I really like it, so I figured I’d let you all know about
it too. Of course I should point out this isn’t the only third party file manager out there. One
good article I found is from MakeUseOf.com where they went through a bunch of options,
some of which are even free. I haven’t tried any of the others so I can’t speak to them,
but might be worth looking at, I’ll put a link to that article in the description.
Let me know what you think and if you're familiar with Directory Opus and I missed any
major features, let me know. Or maybe you have a different choice of program you use instead,
you can tell us why. Either way if you enjoyed this video, be sure to give it a big thumbs up
by smashing your hand through the screen, and consider subscribing and clicking the bell
and all that. If you want to keep watching, the next video I’d recommend is where I talked about
another really cool new program included in Windows most people don’t know about,
I’ll put that right here. So thanks so much for watching, and I’ll see you in the next one.