The tags are stored between sessions, you can display them in a new column "Tags" in Details view, they can be shown in the File Info Tips, and you can Find Files by them (with all Boolean splendor, and extremely fast because these searches are indexed). Assigning tags can be comfortably done from a Tag List which can be popped using toolbar buttons.

Toolbar buttons to Add, Set (New), Remove, and Find tags. The buttons pop a tag list (aka "Tag Cloud") that is automatically and/or manually generated.

Here's an example showing a couple of tagged files. The tags are shown alphabetically sorted in the Tags column. The File Info Tip on hovering the file shows the Label, Tags, and Comment information as well (optionally):

Now let's search for files with tag "girls". Simply select "girls" from the dropdown menu of the blue Find by Tags toolbar button. "Search Here" is ticked because we only want to search the current branch for now.

And here's all "girls" in the current branch:

Now let's search for "girls" everywhere. Tick "Search Everywhere" in the dropdown menu and then select "girls" once again.

And here's all "girls" in the whole computer. As you see some have been found on a network drive. The complete search took 32 milliseconds, not bad:

In the Help you find examples for searching by Tags using Boolean logic.

Note that this feature is supported on the Info Panel as well as with Thumbnails, MouseDownBlowUp, and Full Screen Preview. To enable the grid check Configuration | Preview | Show grid under transparent areas. The grid for Thumbnails is controlled independently by Configuration | Thumbnails | Show grid under transparent areas.

PNG preview with transparency grid.

Icon preview with transparency grids for each icon in the resource. What other file manager can do this?

Thumbnails with a transparency grid. What other file manager can do this?

Examples for a local and a remote license file:

[Settings]
Lic="appdata\Lic.ini"

[Settings]
Lic="\\CentralServer\XYdata\Lic.ini"

Do you regularly go into the forests and snap trees? Now you are sitting on thousands of tree pics and need to name them? And you are being fed up with typing "melanoxylon" and "hemisphaerica" all night long? So what about selecting the name from a handy dropdown menu?! Like this one, for example:

A menu like the above is easily made within a Custom Toolbar Button. Paste the following lines into the On click event of the button, and tick Fire click on mousedown. Set the Icon field to :rename.

Here's Abbey Clancey shortly before being renamed to melanoxylon.

Here's what you see when a file named melanoxylon.jpg already exists.

                Templates
                -00   -aa
             ---------------
Increments   1: -01   -ab
             2: -02   -ac
            25: -25   -az
            26: -26   -ba
           100: -100  -dw
           675: -675  -zz
          1000: -1000 -bmm

You see, the hexavigesimal system saves space and is fun. :)

Your system and breadcrumb wrapped up for quick access.

Mouse options in Configuration | Extended.

To preview UTF-8 encoded text files without a BOM you have to tick "UTF-8 auto-detection" here:

NTFS Junctions (aka junction points, or directory junctions) and NTFS Symbolic Links (aka symlinks, or soft links) can be easily created using the Paste Special submenu. Simply copy one or more items to the clipboard, then go to where you want to have the links, and then "paste" them using menu Edit | Paste Special | Create Junction(s) respectively Create Symbolic Link(s).

Note that Symbolic Links need Vista or later.

Here is an example script for folderreport():

The output could look like this:

C:\Program Files\XYplorer\Data
... AutoBackup (35,92 KB, 1 items)
... FindTemplates (0, 0 items)
... NewItems (0, 2 items)
    ... New (0, 0 items)
... Panes (7,04 KB, 4 items)
    ... 1 (3,96 KB, 1 items)
    ... 2 (3,07 KB, 1 items)
... Scripts (0, 0 items)

If Auto-backup Configuration is enabled the current INI file is auto-backupped to the folder <xydata>\AutoBackup before it is modified, if the last auto-backup is older than 24h.

Import Catalog: Here you can import other catalogs into the current catalog at the position right before the currently selected category.

Export Category: Here you can export the current category as a self-contained catalog. This one-category-catalog can later be imported, but also be loaded stand-alone.

This feature allows you to easily move data between catalogs, and it provides a new elegant way of sharing extended functionality (scripts, filters ...) between users.

A catalog with items from two included catalogs. The items from the first included source are marked with a green square, the one from the second source with a red square. Note that the number of included catalogs is not limited, nor their size.
The tooltip shows the path of included catalog #2: it's located on a server.

Included Catalogs are not simply appended or inserted, but merged into the master catalog, so that items from different catalogs are combined within the same categories. Once included those external items work just like normal items, with one important difference: They are read-only. The included source files will never be altered.

Check out the Help under Including Catalogs for more information.

You need to work with only 3 items out of a long list. Select them and click "Filter Selected Items" in the right-click menu of the Toggle Visual Filter toolbar button.

Now only the 3 selected items are visible. The toolbar button's pressed state, the tab header's icon overlay and caption color, and the statusbar color show that this is a filtered view.

When the filter is applied you can deselect the items as you wish. The filter is retained across sessions in the most-recently-used Visual Filters list, and can be re-applied at any time using this list (even without selecting the files).

Here's an example:

In the alias definition the arguments are referred to by placeholders <@1>, <@2>, <@3> etc. On using the alias the argument values are passed as a comma-separated list, separated from the alias name by at least one space. Any surrounding spaces are trimmed. Then <@1> is replaced with the first argument, <@2> with the second, etc. Up to 9 arguments are supported.

For example, here's an alias using two arguments. First define it once by running this line through the Address Bar:

@Greet=::echo "Hello, <@1>! It's <@2>!";

Then make use of it, e.g. pass the arguments Don and Daisy. Again, feed this line through the Address Bar:

@Greet Don, Daisy

The alias is now internally resolved to the following line, which is then immediatly executed as if it had been fed directly into the Address Bar. In this case it is a script line that will pop a message box:

::echo "Hello, Don! It's Daisy!";

This feature takes aliases to the next level, and it's not hard to imagine the powerful uses it allows.

You do this in Configuration | Templates | Command Line Interpreter. The Command Line Interpreter is used when you use the DOS command syntax in location ports like the Address Bar, e.g. !dir. It is also used by the command Open Command Prompt Here (Tree folder context menu). It's an alternative to the factory default Command Line Interpreter cmd.exe.

You have employees, you have children, you have parents, you have a husband. They shall play with your files, but not with all of your files. And not all sorts of games. You need some amount of control. You need Access Control. Hey, you can even use it to protect you from yourself.

Access Control is invoked using Admin.ini, a plain text file located in the path of XYplorer.exe. If it is not there yet, simply create it. Create with admin rights so that the normal user cannot modify it. The section name for Access Control related keys is [AccessControl].

For example, this is all you need to enter into Admin.ini to limit activity to Desktop and \\ServerB\Work, disallow Move, Delete, and Rename even in the allowed locations, and generally disable Scripting and User-Defined Commands.

This is what the users sees if he attempts to access a disallowed location.

This is what the users sees if he attempts to perform a disallowed operation.

The color can be set in Configuration | Colors & Styles | Selection Box. Here are some examples:

The new command Edit Tagged Items... (in Configuration | Tags) offers backdoor access to the tags database in its current state in memory. You can edit the records, remove records, add records. Using Editor Mode you can outsource the work to a text editor of your choice. This feature also comes in handy at checking out orphans and manually reviving them by updating the paths.

FYI, here is the record syntax:

filename|label|tags|reserved1|reserved2|reserved3|comment

The progress dialog showing a completed backup operation.

The menu under the Reports button offers various filtered reports, depending on the outcome of the operation.

Example for a report on all overwritten files (in this case all files have been overwritten). Note that such reports are also available when the operation is paused.

Configuration options for backup operations in XYplorer 9.90.1100.

Normal Overwrite:

Safe Overwrite:

Safe Overwrite is optional and has to be enabled in Configuration | File Operations | Backup Operations.

Here's what the box has to offer:

An unfiltered listing of Recent Locations.

The same listing as above, filtered for "Pics". Note how the line numbers (inverted colors mark the list as filtered) still refer to the position in the unfiltered list.

Quickly and clearly shows that the list is empty (and not e.g. busy trying to connect).

Access Control is invoked using Admin.ini, a plain text file located in the path of XYplorer.exe. The new key DisallowedDirs can be used to disallow operations in certain locations. In this example, the user is allowed to operate anywhere apart from E:\Test and E:\Secret. Note that disallowance includes all subfolders.

[AccessControl]
DisallowedDirs=E:\Test|E:\Secret

Any number of paths can be concatenated, separated by a | (pipe).