■ Sort out your autorefresh woes

File management is all about change: files are created, copied, renamed, saved with modified content or deleted. xplorer² is usually quite good with automatically sensing changes in the folders you are working with, and it will update the folder contents. Once in a blue moon it may go deaf about a particular event; in that case you can ask a manual refresh with View > Refresh menu command or <CTRL+R> keys — but you don't need to do this frequently.

Things are worse if you are using the folder tree or scrap containers (eg. search results). Windows shell has an "event overflow" limit of just 10 changes; if you are moving a lot of files, instead of the details you just hear that "things have changed" and it is up to the program to figure out what and where — this usually means an inefficient whole tree refresh to find the location of the change. So if you are using the folder tree or scrap windows, you may need to press <CTRL+R> more often to force a manual refresh.

A minority of xplorer² users have persistent autorefresh problems. I don't know, computers are complex systems with interacting settings, so things can go pear-shaped occasionally. If you are one of these unfortunate folks, use Tools > Advanced options menu and tick the option Alternative auto-refresh mechanism:

This option will beef-up xplorer² autorefresh but it comes at a cost: many times xplorer² will refresh the entire folder instead of just the single file that has changed. In small folders you wouldn't know the difference, but in large and fast changing folders (e.g. Downloads) it may drain lots of resources. If you find that xplorer² spends all its time stuck refreshing folder contents again and again, use View > Hold autorefresh menu command. When the storm has passed use the same menu command to resume the normal xplorer² change sensor.

It may happen that you have turned on this command accidentally, so check it first if your autorefresh is ailing!

I close this topic with sundry autorefresh trivia:

xplorer² will only refresh the active tab folder. Changes in hidden tabs are ignored until such time you activate another tab — where a full content refresh will occur if need be. The advanced option that controls this behavior is called "Allow inactive tabs to consume resources..."
Autorefresh may cause folder contents to "jump", xplorer² scrolling the folder pane away of the file you are trying to work with — because xplorer² tries to bring the focused item back into view after an automatic refresh. To avoid such view jumps, either click on the item you are working with (make it focused), so xplorer² won't scroll away, or disable the program option "Automatically re-sort" (Tools > Options menu, Sorting section)