The name is unfortunate, and I hate to see Discord pushed in the readme, but I otherwise am supportive of this. Looks nice.

I should also add that it's a little sad when free software is made for use with something proprietary (Windows in this case, but Minecraft mods are a similar problem). Maybe this could run on ReactOS someday as well.

Not until ReactOS gets the COM vNext introduced by WinRT.

I've not tried Win 11 but this is looking much nicer than the Windows 10 explorer.

I've always felt there's far too much going on with Win 10's explorer and don't use half of it. The left navigation pane is a clutter and when you insert a USB device it you end up with it appearing twice often at two different levels. Items often appear in the quick access by themselves and the ribbon looks like they just selected the menu items but didn't bother to check if it actually made UX sense.

So I'm glad to see that on first glance these issues appear to have been addressed in Files.

I don't use Windows much, mostly just for gaming, but I do have Win11 and the issues you describe with the Explorer are still there.

I've never understood the reasoning of the reorganization that happened in 10, in particular why some things would end up showing twice.

I know in Windows 10 you could remove some of the clutter by editing the registry (which would be helfpully undone by some updates). Don't know if it's still the case in 11.

A mix of too many cooks, I would guess.

The Windows 10 file explorer architecture traces back to the XP one, with several COM extension points, and it got some re-architecture on post vista as they doubled down on using COM for what were originally .NET based ideas for Longhorn.

For example the File/Open common dialog became COM based as well.

On Windows 11, from what I have read they did a full WinUI 3.0 reboot (the migration of UWP COM on top of Win32), losing half of the features in the process.

So far I still consider Windows 11 as the next Vista/Windows 8, and am as eager to update as on those versions.

I don't see a tree view of the files on the left side panel.

The Mac osx finder app also suffers from this deficiency - no tree view of your file system.

Yes, for me this is also a big disadvantage, unfortunately.

Tried it out this morning, and while the UI is nice, the whole thing feels sluggish and unresponsive compared to the native file explorer. I thought it might have to do with indexing so I let it run for a while but it never seemed to get any faster unfortunately.

Well, they did say it was modern.

I imagine it might be related to how they are handling the UWP/WinUI asynchronous file access, which if not done properly is indeed slower than bare bones classical Win32.

Some of those screenshots look a lot like gnome file browser.

And the features they tout on the home page seem like they're taken from the macOS Finder

White font on light gray background. White font on dark gray background. It is better to protect your eyes before it is too late.

I use Windows pretty much only at work, and I'm on vacation (well, staycation, really), but I use FreeCommander on Windows and Path Finder on MacOS and avoid File Explorer and Finder when I can. This seems to say it has multiple panes, but does it?

Is there a simple .exe I can run? Instead of going through a store or whatever?

Not an exe, but here’s the installer right from their site: https://files.community/download/stable

It feels very slow and gets stuck when reading folders with very large number of items.

Scroll performance is pretty bad on low end mobile device