Review: AB Commander

June 4th, 2007 by admin

The built-in Explorer application in Windows is rather wimpy, and every power user soon looks for a decent replacement. I looked at dozens of alternatives before settling on AB Commander, a dual-pane Explorer replacement.

AB Commander’s dual-pane view suits me well, since I often need to deal with two folders at a time, but rarely more than that. In contrast to Explorer, AB Commander is very keyboard friendly, providing shortcuts for almost every activity (although the shortcuts are not customizable). No matter where you are, navigating is very quick:

  • Enter navigates into a folder
  • Backspace navigates back a level; Alt+Backspace navigates to the root of the current drive
  • For every folder that is visited, it remembers and reselects the subfolder that was previously selected
  • Alt+Left and Right Arrow go forward and back in the navigation history
  • Ctrl+D, letter navigates to a given drive
  • Alt+D or Ctrl+J can be used to navigate directly to a folder (and provides a drop-down list of recently accessed folders)
  • Ctrl+G displays a list of common and recent folders for navigating directly to
  • Ctrl+H displays the history of recently accessed folders
  • Ctrl+O shows a list of favorite folders

    AB Commander does a good job of leveraging the existing Windows shell rendering and navigation capabilities while adding lots of functionality that is missing from Explorer itself. It can also completely replace Explorer for most shell integration (display virtual folders, take over Windows+E shortcut and association with folders, show regular Explorer context menu, etc.). Some of the additional features I use frequently include filtering, favorites, history, quick editing, and drive and new folder shortcuts.

    AB Commander has been very stable for me on Windows XP, the latest release supports Windows Vista, and an x64 edition is also available. If you’re looking for a Windows Explorer replacement, AB Commander should be on your list to evaluate.

    • Posted in Power tools |

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