I downloaded this 4.9MB file from Google Code. QMMander is a free open source Windows Explorer alternative and it is pretty cool. It gives you a dual pane experience to relieve you from the pain of having to open two Explorer windows to drag and drop files between.

But that's not all - no sir re bob! QMMAnder is not a one hit wonder! You can also have two separate listing types going on at the same time. Qmmander is written in C++ and uses Qt, a cross-platform application and GUI framework from Nokia. The Google Code page says that the application is buggy but I have not run into any issues yet.

You can have one window preview showing a detail listing so you can sort by file size, while in the right pane you have big icons so you can easily recognize the file icons you are looking for. The software is also portable and can (should) be run from a USB or thumb drive.

A person's Explorer tells a lot about them. If you are using the built in Windows Explorer it shows that you do not like to tweak but if you are using something like this - it shows you think outside the box. That's not just because I am a geek right?

Let's see what QMMAnder can do! When you first launch the application you will be seeing double - the same thing on both sides, as you can see below:

windows explorer alternative

Let's fix that and make them two different drives You can see this view below:

alternative to windows explorer

Yeah yeah, we all know you can sort by each column by simply clicking on the headers but let's check out the program's other options. As we said before, you can change each view. Here is an example:

qmmander - free explorer alternative

You change the view on each item by selecting a pane and then clicking on one of these buttons in your toolbar:

image

The buttons are as follows: details, list, little symbols, big symbols, directory tree or split horizontally instead of vertically (respectively). You can also change these from the options menu as you can see below:

qmm4

You can also swap the left side with the right or vice versa as well as refresh or switch which side is active. Let's check out how the horizontal split looks. This seems like it would be a better view for me:

qmm5

And that is my view! Wow I love it - the detailed listing on top and the tree view on the bottom. This Windows explorer alternative is very versatile and uses very little memory.

What do you guys use for a file browser? I know that Make Use of readers aren't using Explorer - are you? We would love to hear about what you are using in the comments - so leave us a comment!

Oh and if you do hit any bugs leave them in the comments as well so we can all bombard the author with them! :) Karl Gechlik over and out.