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If you are a Microsoft Windows user, then you most likely use the File Explorer tool to manage your files and folders. For most people, File Explorer works fine but for Windows power users, it may not have enough features to call it good enough. There are other files managers you can use such as OneCommander and Files, but in this article, we will be discussing the Double Commander file manager app for Windows, Linux and macOS.
The Double Commander file manager app has a lot of advanced features so we will be going over the basics plus some of the more useful features. Then if you think you are interested in using Double Commander, you can download it and try it out yourself.
The reason this app is called Double Commander is because it features two side by side windows where you can have different folders open on each side. Plus, you can have multiple tabs in each window. You can also have the two panes shown on the top and bottom by going to the Show menu and choosing Horizontal Panels Mode.
To open a new tab, you can right click on an existing tab or go to the Tabs menu and choose New Tab. You can also rearrange and rename tabs by right clicking on them. You can even create a “tab favorite” that will save your currently opened tabs, allowing you to load them all just by loading your favorite from the Tabs menu. You can have multiple favorites as well. Under the tab you will have the folder path, and you can click on any parent folder to go back to that folder or click on the green up arrow to go up a level.
The toolbar at the top of the app has several tools to do things such as refresh, open a command prompt in the current directory, change the folder views, zip files, open the search tool and more. The text menus at the top of the app have the same options as the toolbar plus many others.
One useful feature of Double Commander is the ability to assign a mask to your files. This is used to mark files of a certain type in red, so they are easier to see. If you go to the Mark menu and choose Select a Group or use the Select a Group button on the toolbar, you can then assign your input mask as shown below.
Once we apply our .docx mask to have Double Commander mark Microsoft Word documents, they will be shown in red, making them easier to find within the folder.
Another useful feature is the directory compare tool. This can be used to compare the files in two folders with each other to show which are the same and which are different. You will first need to open the two directories within Double Commander and then go to the Mark menu and choose Compare Directories. Any files that exist in both folders will be left with black type and the ones that are not in both directories will have red type.
The Find files (search) feature of Double Commander gives you a lot of flexibility to help you find exactly what you are looking for. This can be accessed from the search icon on the taskbar or from the Commands menu.
As you can see in the image below, there are several tabs with different settings that can be used to help you find your files. You can even use the Find text in file option to search within files.
The Advanced tab has options to search for files by date, size and well as the ability to search for duplicate files.
If you want to synchronize the files between two directories, you can use the Synchronize dirs. option from the Command menu or the toolbar. You can then synchronize all files or a specific type of file by adding its extension in the Input mask box next to the folder path.
For example, if we add *.docx for the input mask and click the Compare button, we will be shown which files are identical, different or unique. The image below shows that 15 of the files (shown in black) are identical while 6 of the files (shown in green) are unique to the left side (source). If we were to click the Synchronize button, the files would then be synced from left to right.
To synchronize all the files in the folders, you can use *.* for the input mask as seen below.
When it comes to options, Double Commander has plenty of them to keep you busy tweaking how the app works. The options can be accessed from the Configuration menu and is broken down into several categories with some of them having subcategories.
As you can see, the Double Commander file manager app is a powerful tool you can use to manage your files in Windows, Linux and macOS.
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