Elixir

Windows File Explorer wants to make it easy to navigate through crowded contents, but also get a clear view of all items in different modes, be them previews, or thorough sets of details. In case you want to generate a report based on content, you might need to rely on third-party alternatives, and Elixir is a suitable example here.

The application comes in a pretty lightweight package, and you don’t even have to go through a setup process to make it work. This means it’s possible to have it stored on a USB flash drive in case you want to use it on other computers. The health status of the target PC remains intact, because registry entries are not modified.

In order to provide a clear view of all functions, and make navigation comfortable, the application stores sets of functions in different tabs, such as main, header, footer, body, find and replace, formatting, as well as general options. You might want to go through all of them for a proper configuration of the report.

Note, however, that reports are only generated as TXT, but the visual style can be customized surprisingly well. What’s more, you can have different profiles created and saved, so later on you just switch to them from a dedicated drop-down menu. Reports include all items inside the selected directory.

Sadly, the application can’t read items inside subdirectories, and there’s no option in this regard. On the other hand, you can add multiple folders on the list. Custom styles can be created by filling up header, body, and footer with nearly any characters of interest. Lists benefit from a whole variety of parameters to display file info, as well as some specialized triggers to read audio tags, or display image previews.

In conclusion, Elixir comes as a reliable application to use whenever you need to build thorough, custom reports on folder contents. There’s a great deal of customization, but it could have used options to include subdirectories in the process.