File Explorer: a Windows Explorer replacement built on tabs and spreadsheets

A file manager that borrows from the spreadsheet

File Explorer describes itself as a Windows file manager with an interface similar to Windows Explorer, but one that browses and searches folders with many files faster than Explorer does, and that has features Explorer does not have. The distinctive part of that feature list is not the tabs. It is that file operations are expressed the way a spreadsheet works.

Batch rename takes Excel-style formulas, and custom columns are calculated columns written with the same formula syntax. Filtering uses an Excel-style drop-down filter, with a filter editor that lets you add conditions and group them with logical operators, and there is conditional formatting that changes the appearance of individual cells or whole rows according to conditions. The stated purpose of the last one is to highlight critical information, identify trends and compare data.

Put together, these features describe a tool for treating a folder of files as a table. That is a real and common need, the kind of thing people end up scripting in Python or exporting to a CSV, and it is the reason this project exists rather than being one more tabbed browser.

The interface itself is a hybrid. Instead of the separate navigation pane and details view, File Explorer shows a combination of the two, so you can select a folder in the navigation pane or double-click it in the main pane, and double-clicking also sets the current working directory. The subfolders of the current working directory can be expanded in the main pane, giving a tree-like view of folders and files in one place.

Tabs that detach, and the save and load layout feature

Tabbed browsing is the first feature documented, and the interaction is specific: clicking a folder with the middle mouse button, or with the CTRL key and the left mouse button, opens it in a new tab. Tabs can be detached into a separate window by dragging one, and moved up or down within the tab bar. You keep several folders open and switch between them.

The second structural feature is the ability to persist your view of a folder. The save and load layout feature stores the layout of the current folder, and optionally of all its subfolders, with every customisation you have applied: sorting, grouping, filtering and custom columns. The next time you browse that folder, the saved layout is loaded automatically. On a deep tree that is explored regularly, this is the feature that separates a file manager from a viewer.

Tree view sorting is a smaller point but one that shows the project's attention to Explorer's gaps. The documentation names the limitation directly: Windows Explorer only allows sorting of folders in list view, while File Explorer also allows sorting the subfolders of the current folder in the tree view.

Drag and drop is fully supported with other applications including Windows Explorer itself, which matters for a tool that is meant to sit alongside the shell rather than replace it permanently.

Column sets for media, documents and audio metadata

The default columns are the basic file system information: name, type, size, date created and date modified. Everything else is added through the Add Column menu, and the built-in sets are grouped by what they describe.

Basic file info adds extension, parent name, parent path and path. Image file info adds width and height. Video file info adds duration, frame width and frame height. Audio file info adds bitrate, sample rate and channels. The music set is the widest, with album, title, genre, album artists, contributing artists, composers, year, track and track count. Once added, the same formula mechanism used for batch rename can be used to build calculated columns from these values.

The Preview Pane sits at the rightmost of the application and covers images, Word documents, Excel files, text files, PDF files, and video and audio files. The documented image list runs from .avif and .bmp through .webp and .wdp, the Word list includes .rtf, .docx, .odt, .epub and .html, and the Excel list includes .xlsx, .xlsb, .xlsm and .csv.

Two operational details are worth noting. Some extensions, the Word and Excel ones specifically, may take a long time to load, and the documentation tells you to disable them in the Extension Manager. And where several extensions can preview the same file type, such as Text and RichText both handling HTML, you can set a priority so one is preferred.

Context menus you can program and filter

Right-clicking an item normally shows File Explorer's own context menu, while right-clicking with the CTRL key held shows the standard Windows context menu. That second behaviour is a deliberate concession: the tool does not try to lock you out of the shell's own commands.

Custom menu items can be created, and they support expressions. The documented example assumes you want a context menu item that creates thumbnail images with a movie thumbnailer such as MTN.exe, and the expression it uses passes the selected path to the thumbnailer with arguments for an output .jpg file of 4 rows and 3 columns, so the result has the same location and name as the video file. The point of showing it is that the path is interpolated for you, and the arguments are yours to tweak for your own needs.

The filtering model has three dimensions. An extension filter shows the menu on files with the specified extensions. A selection filter controls whether it appears when the selection is single or multiple. An item type filter controls whether it appears for a file or a folder. Combined, they let a menu item apply to exactly the set of items you intend it for, which is the difference between a useful extension and a nuisance.

Installing it is extracting a ZIP and running the binary

The application is portable. The documentation states the requirement plainly: it needs the .NET Framework 4.8, you extract the ZIP file and start using it, with no installer described. The download link given is:

https://github.com/omeryanar/FileExplorer/releases/latest/download/FileExplorer.zip

Because it is unpackaged, there is no registry entry, no Start menu entry and no file association written for you. That is the trade for the portability, and it also means the application is not registered as a shell extension, so it does not replace Explorer in the taskbar or in the file dialogs of other applications.

The source layout shows how the piece is put together. The top level holds FileExplorer.sln, a FileExplorer.Common/ directory, a FileExplorer/ directory for the main application, a FileExplorer.Extension/ directory, and one directory per preview extension: FileExplorer.Extension.ImagePreview, FileExplorer.Extension.PdfPreview, FileExplorer.Extension.RichTextPreview, FileExplorer.Extension.SpreadSheetPreview, FileExplorer.Extension.TextPreview and FileExplorer.Extension.VideoPreview. Each preview type is therefore a separate component rather than a branch in the main application, and the Extension Manager referenced in the preview section is where those components and their priorities are managed. The implementation language is C#, and the licence is MIT.

A single developer project with a dated release trail

The maintenance picture is the part to weigh most carefully. The tagged releases are v4.0 from 2025-08-17, v4.1 from 2026-03-02 and v4.2 from 2026-07-04, and the last push to the repository was on 2026-10-19. The repository is not archived, and the release gaps are irregular, with roughly seven months between the first two tags and four between the next two.

That pattern is consistent with a project maintained in the open by its author rather than released on a schedule. For a personal utility that is fine, and the MIT licence places no obstacle to using it at work. What it does mean is that no compatibility promise exists: a change to the extension model or to the .NET requirement can arrive in any tag, and there is no documented upgrade path between versions.

The same applies to the extension directories. A preview extension is a separate project, and whether an update to one arrives with or independently of the main application is not something the documentation says. Anyone who depends on a specific preview format should keep the matching build rather than assuming the latest ZIP contains what they had.

The MIT licence is permissive, with no obligations beyond preserving the notice, and there is no CLA or contributor agreement in the repository layout. For a company that wants to fork and maintain this internally, that is a clean starting position.

Where this file manager is the wrong choice

The first limitation is that it does not replace the shell. It has no shell integration, no integration with the file open and save dialogs of other applications, and no handling of the Windows taskbar preview or the jump lists. If your workflow depends on Explorer being everywhere, this is an additional tool rather than a replacement, and the comparison with Explorer in the documentation, that it browses and searches folders with many files faster, is about large directory trees rather than about the whole system.

The second is the .NET Framework dependency. It requires the .NET Framework 4.8, which is a Windows component rather than a self-contained runtime, so on a stripped down or locked down machine the application may not start at all, and on a current Windows release the framework is present but is a legacy dependency that a corporate image might not carry.

The third is that the spreadsheet model has a cost. Calculated columns and formula-driven renames do a lot, and they are also a second thing to learn on top of file management, with a formula dialect you will have to discover rather than read about, since the documentation shows the expression syntax only through one context menu example. For a user who wants tabs and nothing else, the extra concepts are overhead.

The real alternative is worth stating plainly. Windows Explorer already handles most file work, and third-party file managers such as Total Commander, XYplorer or Directory Opus add tabs and dual-pane navigation without asking you to relearn renaming. What those tools do not do is give you spreadsheet formulas over file metadata, conditional formatting on file rows, and per-folder saved layouts. That gap is what File Explorer fills, and it is the only reason to prefer it over a general purpose third-party file manager.

Editorial conclusion

Adopt File Explorer if you work inside large folder trees on Windows and miss tabs, want to rename and columnise files with spreadsheet formulas, and are willing to install an unpackaged .NET Framework 4.8 application that is not integrated into the shell. Do not adopt it if you need shell integration, an audited build, or a maintained support commitment, since it is a single developer project with a permissive MIT licence and no release cadence you can plan around. Before switching, extract the ZIP and compare its behaviour against Explorer on your own folder structure, check which preview extensions you can disable in the Extension Manager, and confirm that the tab and layout customisations you rely on are saved per folder before you move a large amount of work into it.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. Issues
2. License: MIT
3. omeryanar/FileExplorer on GitHub
4. README
5. Releases