FreeCommander is a free file management application that brings some of the best features of the classic Norton Commander program into the Windows age. Some of the key functions of the software may take a bit of effort to understand, but once those are mastered, you should be able to realize much of the potential of this powerful utility.

Once you have downloaded and installed the latest version of FreeCommander and started the program, you should see a screen similar to the one shown below:

The first thing most users will want to do is customize the appearance to their preferences. To begin, select the Extras menu and click on Settings:

Once you have entered the Settings dialog, you will see a series of categories listed on the left side of the screen. To begin customizing the appearance, select the View entry and highlight the options you prefer. It's typical to configure the view to show both System and Hidden files, turn off the grid and set both the Status and File List sizes to show in Bytes as shown below:

Keyboard savvy users may want to move down to the Toolbar entry and deactivate toolbars completely, while others may want to customize them to fit their needs. All the toolbar options should be available in the dialog as shown below:

Other frequent modifications involve the Drives entry. Here you may wish to set the drives to appear listed sequentially in a single Bar or use a more space efficient Combo Box to access the list of drives. If you have a lot of extra drives that are often empty, such as a multi-format flash card reader, you may want to only show those entries if a disk is present in them. Most people connected to resources over a network will want to have the network show as a user selectable drive icon, as indicated below:

Color choices can also be important to many users seeking to customize the interface. A typical modification may be to change Statusbar so that it is the same color as the rest of the primary interface. That setting is located under the Colors2 entry. You can adjust the font color and the background color from this dialog for not only the Statusbar but for other interface elements. You may want to continue exploring each of the Settings entries listed on the left side of the configuration dialog and making changes as you see fit. Once you have completed making changes, you can then focus on changing how information is displayed within FreeCommander.

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