There are several alternatives to the built-in Explorer (which is also not the most advanced application). The lesser known FileVoyager is one such alternative and one that likes to be described as ‘the Swiss army knife for file management’. A description that suggests versatility, and rightly so.
FileVoyager
price
Free
Language
English
OS
Windows (XP SP2 and higher; also portable)
Website
www.filevoyager.com
7 Score 70 
- Pros
- Double file panel
- Built-in media player
- Useful additional functions
- Negatives
- Too busy interface
The FileVoyager installation file comes in two flavors: with and without VLC codecs. This is a first indication of its flexibility: the tool effortlessly plays audio and video files via an embedded media player. But the most striking feature is the two-pane window that allows you to navigate to a different disk location, making operations like moving and copying easier.
Options
It must be said: the interface looks very busy and it takes some getting used to when you first get acquainted with all the icons and buttons. There are no fewer than six different display modes for your files: from a simple list mode to a 3D thumbnail mode. Here you will also find some buttons for more basic file operations, such as cutting and copying, but also for example ‘permanent delete’. Conveniently, FileVoyager keeps track of which locations you have previously visited in each panel, so that you can quickly return to such a location at any time. The context menu largely inherits FileVoyager from the Explorer, but adds a few options. For example, you can have file hashes calculated or sent to VirusTotal. For the latter you must have access to a (free) api key.
Tabs
In addition to the many buttons and the extensive context menu, there are a handful of tabs, each of which contains about 15 buttons. In addition to the usual file operations, you will find here a very flexible (de) archiving tool. One of the tabs can be compared well in terms of options with what you find in the Explorer in the ‘Copy to’ menu. Also worth mentioning is the tool to rename files in batch and to compare folders and files.
Conclusion
If you are not put off by the heavy and somewhat unclear interface, FileVoyager is a flexible file manager, with a few handy extras that would certainly not look out of place in the Explorer.
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