Dedicated to users looking for a Windows Explorer replacement, Control3 File Manager is a file managing application which adopts a graphical interface resembling DOS.

It enables you to explore and perform operations between three different locations at the same time, and it implements a speedy file finder.

Installing Control3 File Manager is a fast and uncomplicated task. The main window has a dark theme and colored options, giving you the possibility to open directories and files with a single click instead of two, as well as to jump to other drives by selecting a letter.

It's possible to copy, delete, rename or move, files and folders, sort them by name, size, time or extension, create new directories, view and edit .txt and .rtf-formatted files, as well as expand or contract the main application window.

The document editor contains basic text formatting options, such as paragraph alignment, numbered or bulleted lists, or font color customization. You can use a standard keyword searcher and replacer, insert the current date, symbols, page breaks or HTML comments, check the spelling, calculate expressions, as well as switch the viewing mode from normal to HTML, BB or Ezboard codes.

Additional options powered by the file manager are available in the right-click menu of the primary panel. Therefore, you can compress files into a ZIP or RAR archive (with or without password protection), turn archives into self-extracting executables, extract archive contents or test the integrity, encrypt and decrypt files (even file names), or make file associations. All these actions can be done without resorting to other programs aside from Control3.

Double click can be enabled instead of single click for opening files and folders. Moreover, you can activate speaker sounds, create mouse trails so that the highlight follows the mouse pointer, switch to another interface skin, change UI colors and default directories, and so on.

We haven't come across any stability issues in our tests, and the app remained light on system resources usage. Although it hasn't been updated for a while, Control3 File Manager comes bundled with interesting file managing features, so you can definitely give it a chance.