There are literally hundreds of ways you can customize this software. All the settings can be contained in a single configuration file, so you can easily create "profiles" as well.

XYplorer probably has the best "bang for the buck". It surely has its cons but considering what one gets for a "small" one-time investment, probably no other comparable feature rich product offers a better license.
The lifetime license ($63.95) includes all future updates for free, lets you install on any number of computers, and includes the portable version.

Bugfixes and new features are released frequently. Additionally, XYplorer can automatically check for updates and has convenient download and update functionality built-in.

It's small and fast, has lots of features, and helps you get your work done faster.

Create rules and configurations to quickly identify and locate specific types of file and display them in various ways.

Manage files with two panes which can be arranged horizontally or vertically - and each can have multiple tabs to boot. You can also easily save and reload open tabs as tab sets.

Uses a very flexible scripting language that you can do many things with it. After learning it, one can get many other tools replaced in favor of a single centralized, extremely customize-able command center, plus writing one own's personal routines to fully perform finely-tuned file management. However, doing basic things like stringing together common renaming and moving tasks takes very little knowledge. Scripting is easy for beginners, is supported by the developer and the community, yet can be incredibly deep and powerful.

With its powerful scripting ability and the easily accessible menu identifiers, creating customized commands and toolbar buttons provides yet even further levels of usability specific to your needs.

Up to 256 actions are logged and can be looked up and undone later in case of a mistake. Undo/Redo works even across sessions (i.e. after closing and restarting the app).

Create custom columns to display all kinds of info snippets or even interactive links and buttons.

An all-purpose area that you can customize for all your needs. It can be a list of favorite directories, run scripts, replace the directory tree, be a program launch pad, and so much more.

XYPlorer, in spite of its complexity and completeness, is very easy to use. Features are obvious. And where they're not obvious they can be discovered easily. An example is the ease of "Jump to Setting" which helps you effortlessly find which of many settings you're looking for.

Mark files with colored labels, tags, comments, as well as multiple columns with user-defined metadata for everything from ratings, urls, and whatnot.

XYplorer is great for heavy keyboard users. Its many keyboard shortcuts are also fully configurable. Additionally, XYplorer offers multiple ways to navigate to file system using only a handful of keys. That said, one can do things with a mouse like press an icon in a custom column to run a script on the corresponding file or folder. Mousers are happy too.

Associate file types with other portable applications on your USB stick.

While other competitors only offer a "community" forum where the developers are absent, in XY's forum the developer answers questions personally, quickly, and consistenly.

Can listen to audio files very easily with a single mouse click on the file icon. This includes FLAC support.

If you're a photographer, wannabe photographer, or you just take a lot of photos, XYplorer is a great file manager for working with images. Combined with the Mouse Down Blow Up (MDBU) feature, previewing photos is very easy.

It doesn't require you to install it on your computer, allowing you to run it directly from a disk or from an USB flashdrive.

Known as Branch View in XYPlorer. Select a folder or multiple folders and select Branch View to get a flat file view of the selected folder/s with files only, folders only or both. Alternatively, select Branch View to get a flat view of the current folder. Results can then be filtered, sorted, organised, moved, copied, renamed etc accordingly.
Extremely useful if you have a lot of files to organise.

Folder sizes and amount of files within the folders can be shown. This is very useful when trying to work out where the HDD space has gone.

Its search ability and functions combined with a multitude of file actions and the ease of creating virtual folders is a major time saver.

Add a custom icon to a set of files or folders based on file type, location, name (or part of name) for example: all files named XYplorer to have 'icon x' or all folders that contain the word XYplorer in the name to have 'icon y', size, date, name length, path etc.

You can customize an infinite number of icons for an infinite number of files and/folders or even just a single one based on what ever combination you want.

No extra files are created like with other programs that place an icon in each directory. The customized icons are stored within the "Icons" folder of the XYPlorer directory while the list of customized file/folder patterns as well as which particular icon to point to are stored within XYplorer .ini file.

It's set and forget as all file/folder icon associations are applied globally. Meaning that all new files or folders that match your predefined pattern or instruction if you like will automatically be displayed with your chosen icon.

Customized icons are also very very flexible. It's so easy to add, remove, change and fine tune your settings to your liking. To turn the customized icons on or off is simply a matter of pressing the handy toggle button.
Further flexibility comes with the ability to turn on or off individual custom icons with a simple tick box.

It is a bit of a learning curve to get the pattern (instruction to select certain files/folders to be associated with a particular icon) just right. But as results are immediately visible, it makes it easy to adjust accordingly to exactly what you want. There are some examples of these patterns included within the "Customize File Icons" UI or settings box to get you started by selecting the "I" button. A more extensive list is available in the XYPlorer help file.

Once you get the hang of it though, the same patterns can be applied to other customizations in XYPlorer for example color filters or Ghost filters.

XYplorer's user interface can be customized in almost every conceivable manner, from size and placement of various frame elements, to fonts, colors, toolbar buttons, if you can think it, you can probably do it.

This is very useful for accessing some context handlers or when using the portable version across several systems.

Windows File Explorer, over time, will eventually allow you to create path lengths, usually accidentally, that are "very long" (ie too many characters based on Windows standards).

And then, out of nowhere, you no longer have full functionality available to the directories and files in that long path.

• eg: you won't be able to open a file, or rename it, or copy it, or delete it, etc.

In order to regain full functionality available to the files/ directories in that "long path", you have to go and manually shorten the "long path" length by deleting characters in filenames, directory names, etc,

In other words, Microsoft will "allow" you to break the rules (.. ie in most cases without warning ), but then won't support the broken rules.

This is where XYPlorer is super useful -- especially when you move big chunks of data from A to B -- you no longer have to care about long path name issues.

Just one license covers all of your computers.

Renaming can also be combined extremely easily in basic scripts for chaining and combining the strengths of the different types of renaming available. Can also rename based on metadata.You don't really need to "learn scripting" to chain a bunch of renaming commands. Multiscripts can even give you a menu of your chained renames - with nested menus if desired. It takes very little knowledge to be able to do this. One can even run such a script by drag and drop.

This is faster than Windows Explorer when combined this with TeraCopy. Currently, it is present in the right-click menu, but you can drag and drop it to copy with Windows File Explorer.

Extensive and active support forum with unusually quick, thorough, and friendly assistance.

Can show all files in a folder and all of its subfolders at once.

So that folders are automatically opened in a new tab of XYplorer rather than on Windows Explorer when called from other softwares.

It's possible to queue copy and move operations so that multiple large copy/move operations don't interfere with each other (disk thrashing) and you can continue working with the program.

Can save any set of command-line options with a friendly label. Switching is as easy as right-clicking on a button.

From documents to audio and video. All files can be previewed from within the program and without the need to open other software packages. This is a very useful feature when working with multiple files.

Easily rename a folder to make it legal. Search for dangerous unicode characters. Rename all files to ASCII if you wish.

Clean and uncluttered interface, easy to concentrate on the files and folders that you need.

In windows file explorer when you want to select a file of the current directory, you have to type exactly the same name from the start of the file. In xyplorer you can type just part of it.

Ex: filename "resume_work"
With xyplorer you could just type work and it would show the file being marked (this is configurable).

Latest beta-release introduces the "dark mode" that we already know from other software. It's auto-computed based on the current colour-settings and has 51 shades of darkness. Can be activated with a simple checkbox, no further tweaking required!

None of the managers, including Opus, Speed commander, Total commander, F man, Xplorer2, Tabbles, etc., but none of them can compare with it in easy usage, features or customization. The author updates it very frequently and has added many users requests.

Most are MP3 only.

A no-click preview to quickly see folder contents, pictures, videos, pdf, office files, archives (zip, rar...)...

A good practice to improve your workflow and eliminate accidental unwanted file movings to places! Brilliant!

Works with help of 7zip, even a portable install works.

The extensive feature list will give you plenty to work with.

Configurable options to prevent accidental file movements or deletions.

Files and folders can be "nuked" without needing to go through the recycle bin.

For example in the find files dialog, you can specify *.srt and contchar:>127 to find all subrip files that contain extended characters.

You can reach the programmer very quickly and request new features.

Right from the context menu, you can copy file names, paths or full file path names. Really handy.

Easily renames one (or many) files right from the context menu. It supports search and replace, batch, regex, changing extension, copy/paste a while list of filenames, spaces to unscore (and vice versa), changing capitalization, and so much more. Also, the "Preview" feature makes it easy to verify changes before applying them. Fantastic!

Extensive support for file tabs. You can rename and lock them too. Even further, you can quickly switch from one tab view to another. You can have sets of tabs for every project you work on. It really speeds up your workflow!

Searching is extremely fast and thorough - no matter if you're looking for items by name, attribute, content, or trying to find duplicates (either with a selected hash or byte-to-byte).

It allows you to search within your files, looking for specific terms, including wildcards and regular expressions.
It also supports regular expressions and filter/sort your search results by file size, file modification date, etc.

Can save complicated, often-used searches easily as "Search Templates" to reuse, tweak, or use in a script.

Can set to instantly narrow a list as you type, or highlight if you prefer, with multiple options such as "Prefer Beginning of Column" or use currently sorted column.

Supports Standard wildcards, Boolean, and Regex.

Mouse Down Blow Up is a quick file preview that pops up when you mouse-down on the icon or thumbnail of a file, and disappears on mouse-up.