About HiFile

Overview

HiFile is a handy and modern file manager for Windows, macOS and Linux. It offers a unified user experience while respecting the specifics of each of these platforms. Its goal is to help you organize all your files and folders and work with them as efficiently as possible. HiFile is very lightweight and fast. It pays a lot of attention to a pleasant user experience and excellent ergonomics.

Dual-pane user interface

HiFile uses a dual-pane layout, which is a traditional layout in many file managers. Having two panes comes in handy when you are copying or moving items from one pane to the other, because you can see both the source and target locations at the same time. It is also very useful when you want to switch to a different location, but want to keep your previous location visible so you can return to it later. You can switch between the panels using the Tab key.

Lots of features

HiFile will help you to quickly navigate through your file system, find, filter and sort files or folders, perform operations such as copying, moving, renaming, deleting, creating archives or extracting items from archives, viewing text files, binary files or images, and much more. Images of the main menu provide an overview of the most important functions and their keyboard shortcuts.

Customizing user interface

User interface of HiFile is highly customizable to your taste. You can change style, colors, icons or layout. Even more customizations will come in the future versions. It is especially easy to change the size of controls by "zooming" the user interface. This can be done in the same way as in web browsers - either by zooming with the mouse or touchpad or by pressing Ctrl+Plus to zoom in or Ctrl+Minus to zoom out or Ctrl+0

Super-fast navigating with Space key

The Space bar is a very powerful key in HiFile. It allows you to jump from one folder to another without having to traverse the folder tree structure. You can use the Space bar to switch between the list of drives and bookmarks and the list of recently used folders. In both cases, when you start typing the name of a folder, HiFile will quickly offer you the right folder, regardless of whether it is a drive, a bookmark or a recently used folder. This may sound trivial, but this feature is highly addictive because of its amazing efficiency.

Filtering items

Just start typing the name of the item or items you want to find in the current folder and HiFile will automatically filter only those names that begin with the text you typed. If you put an asterisk "*" in front of the text, HiFile will display the item names that contain the text. There is also a similarly efficient mechanism for filtering or selecting files by their extension.

With Shift+Space, you can set filters based on extension, modification date, or using customizable predefined filters. In these dialogs you can also easily see the number of items in each group. This filter can also be cleared with Escape.

Selecting items

To perform an operation on multiple items, you need to select them. Selected items are highlighted in a different color, depending on the selected color theme. You can select items by pressing Ctrl or Shift together with cursor keys or with mouse press. With Ctrl+A you can select all items in the current view. Remember that unlike in many other programs, where selection is canceled with a single click, selection in HiFile is persistent. It will not be canceled until you press Escape or leave the current folder.

Bookmarks

There are usually a few folders which you work with more often than with others. If you add these folders to your bookmarks using Ctrl+B or the star icon, you can access these folders much easier. Bookmarked folder is indicated by a filled star icon. Then this folder will be offered at the top of all path searches or can be drag-and-dropped from the bottom toolbar to quickly navigate to it.

Archives

HiFile allows easy work with compressed archives such as ZIP, 7Z, ARJ, RAR, etc. HiFile treats archives as normal folders, you can open them and perform operations any operations like with normal folders. You can copy or move files or folders in or out, you can rename items, create folders inside archives etc. HiFile internally uses 7-Zip archiver. Therefore it can work with all archive types which are supported by this extremely popular free archiver.

Built-in viewers

HiFile allows quick viewing of the content of your files, be it text files, binary files or images. Image viewer allows browsing images in the current folder. You can also easily toggle fullscreen mode by pressing Enter.

Thumbnails

Items can also be viewed as "thumbnails". You will find this useful especially when browsing your picture galleries. Thumbnail mode can be toggled on and off with Shift+F3.

Solving of name conflicts

HiFile will always ask you for confirmation if you are about to potentially overwrite any file. And it will especially warn you in situations when you are about to overwrite newer file with older or overwrite file with folder or vice versa, which are situations when you should pay special attention.

Compare and synchronize folders

HiFile offers a simple but very powerful tool for comparing and synchronizing the content of your folders. You can select a few rules by which the files in the folders are compared, e.g. modification date and/or content and a few more rules by which the files are copied to or deleted from each folder. You can compare and synchronize your folders with Ctrl+S.

Renaming multiple files

HiFile allows renaming multiple files in a single operation. You can define simple rules or formulas by which the new names are generated. For example rule "D" represents date, "C" represents counter, "U" represents uppercase, "L" represents lowercase etc. The final names can be seen in a preview. HiFile, of course, notifies you about all potential conflicts to prevent overwriting your files by mistake.

Clipboard operations and drag-and-drop

HiFile support drag & drop or copy & paste of items within the application as well as between HiFile and many other applications. Dragging the current selection will move or copy the item or items. Drop operation requires confirmation in order to avoid unfortunate mistakes. During confirmation, you can also choose which action you want to perform - copy or move.

But you can also drag a button representing a folder from the header of a panel or bookmark in a toolbar. Drag-and-drop of this button into a panel will then change the current folder in the panel.

Getting more help

Accessing context relevant help and documentation is easy by pressing F1, which will bring you to the full documentation. You can also find answers to your question in FAQs. You may also find usefult checking the list of all keyboard shortcuts. If you have encounter any issue or have any idea for improvement, please report it to dedicated issue tracker.