In Settings > Multitasking, you can enable dual-pane view (which you can close at any time after clicking on the ellipsis symbol). In Settings > On Startup, you can choose to continue where you left off when launching the app. If you install the Themes add-on, you’ll also be able to choose a theme. Under Settings > Appearance, you can set dark or light modes, independently of Windows, and choose whether to have a sub-menu in the right-click context menu. The preview pane (Ctrl + P) is capable of playing videos within the same window. You can also enable checkboxes more easily than in the File Explorer. If you right-click on a file, you’ll see the option to “create folder with selection” – no need to create a new folder first and then move the file into it. The open-source Files app is basically what Windows 11’s File Explorer should have been: the design is consistent with Windows 11’s more polished UI, it supports tabs and panes, and its settings menu is way more user-friendly. This article will guide you in checking out some of the best of them. Luckily, many alternative Windows file managers are available for free, or at least to try. Other basic options such as checkboxes for files and restoring the previous window at startup are so inconvenient to turn on that you may have not even heard about them. The File Explorer doesn’t make file tagging easy either, which can push you to create many sub-folders just to keep your files organized (and that action also requires more clicks than it should). It doesn’t support dual-pane browsing either, which means that even something as simple as moving a file between two folders can make you open two Explorer windows.

While Microsoft’s web browser added tabs 15 years ago with Internet Explorer 7, the operating system’s File Explorer has yet to implement the feature. A key component of Windows that hasn’t fundamentally changed over the years is the File Explorer.

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