■ xplorer² v3.4 bends the laws of physics shell, for extra long folder names

You may have heard the news that windows 10 "supports long paths" (total length >=260 letters) but that doesn't include the shell or windows explorer. In the interest of people that prefer long descriptive folder names, and after lots of low level work, xplorer² now supports paths with lengths of up to 32768 letters. That should cover the most verbose file organization cabinet!

Most of the file operations work just like in normal folders, but since the shell is still agnostic, there are a few limitations:

Prefer robust copy (<F5> key) to transfer files in and out. Copy/paste also works but drag-drop only works into deep paths
Deleting to the recycle bin doesn't work but you can use <Shift+Del> for permanent deletion
Opening documents down deep may fail or even crash the associated application. Opening text files with the internal previewer is ok and the draft preview pane also works.

xplorer2 browsing into a folder with 10000 character length

The full list of deep path limitations can be found in the changelog. Still if you consider that xplorer² has hundreds of commands that work with files, and the majority work transparently, it is definitely no mean feat. Long paths are supported from windows XP, not just win10.

Another useful addition is Edit > Export CSV menu command (if using the ribbon try the command finder for "CSV"). This creates a comma separated text file out of the contents of the current folder pane just as it appears to you. You can open CSV files with MS Excel for further processing. This simplifies the manual text export procedure that was the only way to print folder contents.

WCX packer plugin support
Another big feature added for the ultimate edition is WCX support. You may remember some time ago xplorer² learnt to integrate with Total Commander WLX and WDX (preview and property) plugins. WCX is the last class of plugins that was missing. With them you can browse into many kind of archives in the same way xplorer² enters into zipfolders. For example getting Total7zip will allow you to browse into all archives understood by 7-zip, e.g. 7z, RAR, GZ and more. Using the new Enter archive menu command you can also browse into pseudo-ZIP formats like JAR, APPX, DOCX and the like.

Why would you want xplorer² to enter compressed archives? Because with xplorer² you can do all sorts of things that a dedicated archive program will not, like search for files, preview thumbnails, compare with "real" folders etc.

The easy way to manage all total commander plugins is to download the updated plugin manager (100 KB). Note that for WCX plugins you must declare the list of supported archive extensions as a comma separated list, e.g. 7z,rar,gzip. Please consult the documentation of each plugin for the types supported (defaultextension).

Upgrade information

Version 3.4 is a free upgrade for most people that already own v3.x licenses. A small exception is people who got a v3.0 key as a free upgrade using the "free upgrades for a year" policy. So if your unlock key is dated before 1 January 2015 (check your About dialog), then you'd need a new key. Please use Help > Check for updates menu command or the equivalent from ribbon's File leftmost tab to get the new version.

If you don't have xplorer² installed try the download page for your free trial.