The other day, I was needing to quickly view lots of log files in a folder. The Ol’ “Double click/open in notepad/close notepad/arrow down/repeat” process was getting old quick.

Now, at home, I’ve got Directory Opus, which would make this a breeze. But, it’s a licensed copy, and unfortunately, their licensing is a tad draconian. Besides, I was at an office, so I didn’t have my sernum or anything like that handy.

So, I started poking around. I’d looked at a pile of Explorer replacements awhile back. That’s how I ended up buying DirOpus. But this time, I needed something free I could download, install and get my job done.

A few minutes of googling pointed my to FreeCommander. I can’t say I even looked at this package before, because it’s billed as a “Norton Commander Clone”, and I never really got into Norton Commander.

That picture viewer you see on the right? It’ll view just about any file type, which was just what I was needing.

But come to find out, FreeCommander is much more than just a Norton Commander clone.

There’s lots of very cool features here, including:

• Tabbed explorers
• A decent Tree (it doesn’t show the full tree like explorer does, but it comes close enough to be useful)
• A decent file viewer that can be “in place”, meaning it doesn’t open a new window to show the file being viewed.
• A “Quick Filter” which is very handy.
• Predefined Filters, for when the quick filter isn’t quite enough.
• Lots of config options
• Reasonably fast, even in dirs with lots of files.

And finally, so far, it’s been very stable.

In all, a very compelling Explorer replacement, especially considering the price!