14 DAY TRIAL // Managing the files on your computer is not a very stressing job for a newbie. Just open Windows Explorer and start cut/copy/paste operation. In a jiffy you can move, copy or delete the files stored on your hard drive. For advanced and average users Windows Explorer will never be enough and a third party file managing software will always be sought.
Total Commander remains in my opinion the last in this ?food chain? and its incontestable supremacy could not be shaken one inch. Tries have been made and yet coding, features, options, ease of use, price and resource consumption all point to Total Commander. We can say that the standard of all file managers is imposed by the development of Total Commander.
There are however similar applications that try to bring this supremacy to an end and they almost succeeded if it weren't for minor details (price, minor bugs, functionality or resource usage) that prevented it from taking over the stand.
Ant Commander is a free solution for managing your files and this tabbed double paned software comes absolutely free of charge.
The interface is pretty lame and to be frank I have absolutely no similar software in mind to compare it to, but only XP is improving the looks of the application with its theme. There are however some elements that have been drawn a bit different from all the other items composing the interface. These are the Name, Extension, Size and Date tabs inside the panel.
Despite its ?ugly duckling? look, the GUI will provide the user some of the much needed functionality. The application can be configured to display two file panes and additional panels can be appended (panels, viewers and shells). Adding panels however cannot be done as fast as you want as if you skip the tab name field you will not know what that tab will open.
A minor glitch that will definitely make Ant Commander users confused is the drive letter displayed in the drive combo box. In my case, it keeps displaying A: drive, despite the fact that I have opened drive E:. Also, I have received some errors when trying to open some of the available panels (Ctrl+N for adding a separate panel or Ctrl+T for adding a new panel in a tab) like Generic Panel.
The panels available are directory table, directory tree, text editor, image viewer, HTML viewer or command line. The menu, toolbars, panels and actions can be configured by the user from Configuration menu.
In what concerns the Options, Ant Commander does not give you too many choices and General covers only naming the text editor, enable Scroll Tab Layout, Use Internal Browser, Show Text in Toolbar and Show large Icon.
Ant Commander is supposed to be able to record macros, but during our testing this feature failed and we couldn't even open the text editor in an external window. Utter failure again when trying to see the demo macro script the software has included for demonstration.
The operations you can do with the files include moving, deleting, Shift-deleting, copy, creating a new directory and archive. The shortcuts for the most used operations on files (move, delete, copy and creating a new directory) are exactly the same as in Total Commander. For archiving however (by the way I could not zip a single file, no matter how hard I tried) there is absolutely no shortcut key.
Also, I could not see any Properties window for getting some details of the files stored on the computer.
The Good
Ant Commander is a good way to compare another file manager that actually works. It is a good thing the software comes with more than one skin.
The Bad
Search function is limited to looking in the active drive despite the picture in the Help menu under File Operations with ?Search? option available under File menu.
I tried using the shortcut for moving a file from one drive to another and nothing happened.
The Truth
Generally, I like testing freewares as almost every time I encounter a feature that works better than in a similar commercial software. But Ant Commander really had nothing to offer. It is free and extremely time consuming to work with. Not all the keyboard shortcuts work and you will have to use the menu bar to perform some of the operations.
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
