# 1.1. What is Double Commander?

## Content

1. Presentation
2. Appearance

## 1. Presentation

Double Commander is a twin-panel, cross-platform file manager. Inspired by Total Commander and featuring some new ideas in file management. Double Commander is absolutely free, open source software distributed under the GNU GPL version 2 license.

Some features of Double Commander:

- all operations work in the background with threading operations support

- tabbed panels interface

- custom toolbar with buttons to launch external programs or internal commands

- extended search function with full text search in any files

- multiple files name rename at once

- directory synchronization

- request administrator/root privileges for file operations (if necessary)

- customizable columns

- built-in file viewer (`F3`) to view files of ANY SIZE in hexadecimal, binary or text format

- built-in text editor (`F4`) with syntax highlighting

- archives are handled like subdirectories, you can easily copy files to and from an archive

- supports WCX, WLX, WDX and WFX plugins from Total Commander (also supports its own DSX plugin format)

- operations log

- and more...

Note: the project is under heavy development now, so information presented in this document may be incomplete or irrelevant.

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## 2. Appearance

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