For many users, browsing their files and working with their contents is one of the major tasks to perform on the computer. While most of todays operating systems come with very sophisticated programs to do just that (e.g. the Finder of Apples Mac OS, Konqueror and Nautilus in the Linux world and Explorer under Microsoft Windows), each one of these has its own peculiarities, strengths and weaknesses.

This application is in no way intended to replace these tools or to provide a least common denominator of functionality among them. It is merely intended to provide a home for an extensible set of utility programs and to do so in a platform independent manner.

The utility programs are not actually part of this application but rather come as external FileHandler plugins. This means that the application only provides basic file handling operations but delegates the handling of the contents of these files to those plugins. This allows anyone to write such a plugin to support some file format or to provide different operations on certain files. The application itself is unaffected of that and needs not to be updated for that purpose (only reconfigured).

While a lot of the functionality of this application is redundant to what is available in the operating system programs, it is included nonetheless for convenience reasons and to provide additional possibilities. An example might be to rename a file on disk: Every OS provides many ways of performing that task, but it is more convenient to do it in one place (this application) when working here anyway. However, the application might be set up in such a way as to allow browsing files and directories, but not modifying them in any way. This cannot be accomplished in the OS programs apart from dealing with the tedious setup of file access rights and such. With this application it is a simple matter of flipping a switch.