File Explorer

A file manager inspired by classic Windows Explorer — a tree of folders, a real menu bar, and limited Google Drive built in.

Headline feature: press Space, see the file

If you've ever used a Mac, you know the trick that makes Finder feel like magic: tap the Space bar and whatever you've got selected just shows itself — that's Quick Look, and it's the standout feature Mac people always name first. Windows never got it built in; Windows people who want it install a whole extra app (QuickLook) just to have it. On my Windows machines, that app is an absolute must.

File Explorer has it built in. Select a file and press Space:

• Audio plays right there — no opening another app, no hunting for a play button. It just starts.
• Documents preview without actually opening them — read what's inside without launching the file, changing it, or losing your place in the folder.
• Images show themselves in the preview instead of making you open a gallery.
• Press Space again and the preview stops and closes. You're back in your folder, exactly where you were.

It's the fastest way I know to answer "which one was that?" — and once you've lived with it, a file manager without it feels broken.

Why it exists — what it solves

Phone file apps are touch-only icon grids: fine for finding a photo, miserable for real file work — and nearly unusable with a keyboard or a screen reader. File Explorer takes its inspiration from classic desktop Explorer instead. A tree of folders on one side, the contents on the other, and a menu bar on top. Revolutionary, I know.

• Arrow-key tree: Right expands a folder, Left collapses it, Enter opens.
• A recycle bin, not a cliff: deletes go to an in-app recycle bin first. Nothing is gone for good until you empty it.
• Google Drive, limited on purpose: sign in once, and File Explorer works with the files it put in Drive itself — uploads and its own folders work exactly as before: open, rename, trash, and copy and paste both ways — plus any file, or any whole folder, you hand it. The rest of your Drive is reached through the bridges below, not browsed directly.

Google Drive, in plain words

File Explorer can work with Google Drive — but not the way the Drive app does, and it's worth two minutes to understand, because it confuses everybody at first.

Think of it as a shelf. File Explorer keeps its own shelf inside your Google Drive. It can see everything on its own shelf, and work with all of it — open, rename, delete, copy and paste back and forth between the shelf and this device. What it can't do is wander your whole Drive looking at everything else. The rest of your Drive is still yours and still there — File Explorer just doesn't browse it directly.

Getting started, step by step

1. Open File Explorer and find Google Drive in the folder tree.
2. Choose Connect Google Drive and sign in with your Google account. The sign-in happens on Google's own screen, on your device — File Explorer never sees your password.
3. Your Drive folder will look empty. That's normal, and it's the part that trips people up: the shelf starts empty. Nothing is wrong, and nothing of yours is missing.
4. To put something on the shelf, copy a file from anywhere on this device and paste it into the Drive folder. It uploads, and from then on File Explorer can manage it there.
5. To bring in a file that's already in your full Drive, open the Drive folder's options menu and choose “Open a file from the full Drive…”, then pick the file. It gets a standing shortcut in the Drive list — open it, preview it, or save a copy — and it stays there until you choose Remove from this list.
6. Whole folders work too. Choose “Open a folder from the full Drive…” and grant a folder, and that folder takes a standing place in the tree with everything inside it — not just one file at a time. It stays until you remove it. One honest limit: folders you grant this way are best treated as read-mostly — opening, previewing, and copying things out works fine, but writing changes back into them runs through Google's picker plumbing and can be unreliable. To edit something, copy it onto the device or the shelf first, where saving works the way it should.
7. For anything the shelf doesn't cover, use the Go to Drive button (at the end of the menu bar, or Alt+G) — it opens your full Drive in Google's Drive app or website.

One more thing worth knowing: the shelf is the same on every device. It lives in your Google account, not on one tablet — sign in to File Explorer on your phone and the shelf is there, with everything you put on it from your tablet, and the other way around. The files and folders you hand it are the exception: those grants are remembered per device, so you'll hand a file or folder over once on each device you use.

A worked example

Say there's a file called Station Notes sitting in your full Google Drive, and you want it handy in File Explorer. Open the Drive folder, open its options menu, choose “Open a file from the full Drive…”, and pick Station Notes. Done — it now sits in File Explorer's Drive list. Open it, preview it with Space, or save a copy to this device, any time you like. It stays in the list until you remove it. And a whole folder — say, your podcast folder — works the same way with “Open a folder from the full Drive…”: the folder and everything in it stand in the list together. That's the whole trick: the shelf holds what you put on it, plus whatever you've handed it, file by file or folder by folder.

Why limited? The honest reason

And yes — this part genuinely sucks, and I want to say so out loud. I wanted to offer full Drive support. One sign-in, your whole Drive in the tree, no shelf, no bridges, no headache for anybody. That is how this app should work, and building it that way was never the problem. Here's the wall: full-Drive access is what Google calls a “restricted” permission, and before a shared app may use it publicly, Google requires a paid third-party security audit — priced for companies, anywhere from several hundred to several thousand dollars, and it repeats every single year, however small the app is and however few people use it. This app is free. It makes nothing. I am not able — and honestly, not willing — to pay a yearly toll like that for the privilege of giving software away. So the choice made itself: limited access, no audit, no fee — and the strongest bridges I could build instead (hand it files, hand it whole folders, or one tap to your full Drive). If Google ever prices that door for the little guy, I'll walk through it the same week.

New in 1.18: the default file manager option, fixed

One fix, and it's the headline because a field report caught it dead: "Make File Explorer the default file manager" (Tools menu) could answer that no app could do it. The option was handing the file-manager intent to Android's share chooser, which can't resolve it on some tablets — a Moto, in the report that found this — and a chooser could never have offered "Always" anyway. The option now fires the intent exactly the way the Meta+E key does, so Android's own app picker opens: pick File Explorer, then Always, and Meta+E opens File Explorer from then on. The honest unknown: whether a given tablet's picker offers Always for this intent is a device question — and if a maker has hardwired Meta+E to its own files app, no app can override that.

New in 1.17.1: a mouse, real tab buttons, and servers in tabs

A pointer-and-polish release — this one shows our sighted friends some love: right-click support, real buttons on the tab strip, and mouse-friendly touches throughout. Every one of them is an extra door, never a moved one: the keyboard, the announcements, and the touch gestures of 1.17 are exactly as they were.

Right-click opens the options menu

Pair a mouse with the tablet and right-click a row — in the tree or in the contents pane — and that row is selected and its options menu opens. It's the same menu Alt+Enter, Ctrl+Enter, and a folder's long-press have always opened, reached the Windows way now too: one options path, every door. Rows that are only status lines ("Loading...", "(empty)") open nothing, exactly as they behave under a long-press.

An Options button on the selection toolbar

By touch, a file's full options menu had one gap: long-press a file and you got selection mode and the toolbar's bulk actions (Cut, Copy, Delete, Paste, Clear), but Rename, Properties, and Open With needed a keyboard. The toolbar now carries an Options button exactly while one item is selected — it opens that item's full options menu. Select a second item and the button steps aside; the bulk actions own the bar again.

The tab strip has its furniture

The tabs that arrived in 1.17 could be tapped to switch — but not created or closed from the strip. Now every tab carries a small close (x) button beside its name, and a + button at the end of the strip opens a new tab. The last tab shows no close button, because it can never close. The buttons are the pointer twins of Ctrl+T and Ctrl+W; the keyboard does everything it always did.

FTP servers open in their own tab

A saved server's menu (Tools, FTP servers…) now offers Mount in new tab: the server mounts exactly as always, and when it connects you land in a fresh tab standing at its root, your place in the current tab untouched. Once mounted, Open in new tab — in the same menu, and in the mounted root's own options menu in the tree — opens another tab at the same root. It's one mount shared by every tab that stands in it, never a second connection; if a mount fails, no tab opens and the failure is announced as it always was. Very FileZilla, minus the duplicate logins.

Markdown joins the family routing

Opening a .md or .markdown file now goes straight to WordSmith when WordSmith is installed, and asks what to open with when it isn't — the same treatment .docx and .txt already had. Markdown waited in 1.17 because WordSmith's own Markdown support hadn't shipped; it landed in WordSmith 1.16, so the door is open. Audio routing to WaveSmith is unchanged.

New in 1.17: tabs, and the family fits together

Folder tabs

File Explorer has tabs now — real ones, proven hard on a real device before they shipped. Ctrl+T opens a new tab standing in the folder you're in, Ctrl+W closes it (the last tab never closes), and Ctrl+Tab walks through them — every move announced, so you always know which tab you're standing in. Each tab keeps its own place, and copy and paste work across tabs through the one clipboard the app has always had. In the contents pane, a letter key now jumps to the next item whose name starts with it, the way the contents pane in Windows behaves.

The picker reaches Google Drive

The file picker File Explorer lends to the other apps used to be local-only: an app asking you to open a file couldn't reach your Drive shelf at all. Now, when you're signed in, the picker's tree shows the Google Drive root beside this device — the same shelf, the same files. Pick one and it's downloaded and handed over exactly as if it had been on the device all along, so the app that asked never has to know Drive was involved. Signed out, there's simply no Drive root and no prompt: another app's pick is never interrupted with a sign-in.

Opening a file prefers the family

Open an audio file and it goes straight to WaveSmith when WaveSmith is installed; documents (.docx, .txt) go straight to WordSmith. When the family app for a kind isn't installed, you're asked what to open with instead of Android guessing. Everything else opens exactly as it always has, and Open With still always asks.

Two quiet fixes ride along: the menu bar no longer arms itself as you Alt+Tab away, and Escape — or Back, which is what many keyboards send for it — now leaves the menu bar again.

New in 1.13: servers, archives, and a family picker

FTP and FTPS servers

File Explorer can also reach your own servers. Add a server once — in the Tools menu, under FTP servers… — and mount it when you need it: it stands in the tree like any other storage, and unmounting closes the connection. Nothing stays connected in the background.

• Copy and paste both ways — between this device and the server, through one honest queue: the same clipboard you already use.
• FileZilla-style answers when names clash: if a file at the far end already has the name, you get the question — Skip, Replace, or Rename — with a "do this for all" choice, so a big batch asks once instead of forty times.
• Certificates ask first: a self-signed certificate shows its fingerprint and asks before it's trusted, with an "always trust" choice per server.
• Passwords are stored encrypted on the device, with a key Android itself guards — never in plain text. On a device that can't offer that, the password is asked per session and never written down at all.
• Plain FTP and FTPS (FTP over TLS) are supported. SFTP is a different protocol, and isn't.

ZIP archives

Open a ZIP and choose Extract here, or extract to a folder named after the archive. Entries that try to escape the folder they're aimed at are skipped and reported, and existing files ask before anything is overwritten. Going the other way, any file, folder, or multi-selection can be added to a new ZIP straight from its menu — handy for gathering a folder's worth of files into one thing to send.

A picker for the other apps

File Explorer also lends its eyes to the rest of the family. It offers its own file picker — and a folder picker for saving into — to any app that asks, Powerhouse apps first. WordSmith and WaveSmith route their open and save picking through File Explorer when it's installed, so picking a file feels the same everywhere. And when it isn't installed, they fall back to picking on their own, gracefully — nothing breaks, nothing complains.

Verify your download

After downloading, check the file's checksum against the one published here. If they match, your file is exactly the file that was released — unaltered in transit.

Permissions, explained

Documentation

The full help lives inside the app, under the Help menu: Documentation, What's new, Keyboard shortcuts, and Check for updates. The essentials:

• Tab moves between the folder tree and the contents list — those are the only two stops.
• Right / Left expand and collapse folders in the tree; Enter opens; Space previews.
• Dialogs answer to Alt+Y (Yes) and Alt+N (No).
• Ctrl+R refreshes — including a fresh look at the Drive files File Explorer manages.
• Alt+G — Go to Drive: the button at the end of the menu bar opens your full Drive in Google's Drive app or website.
• Open a file from the full Drive… — in the Drive root's options menu and the Tools menu — opens the system picker on your whole Drive; a picked file keeps a shortcut in the Drive root until you remove it.
• Open a folder from the full Drive… — right beside it — grants a whole folder a standing place in the tree, everything inside it included; best treated as read-mostly (copy out to edit).
• A bare Alt press walks you onto the menu bar, the classic Windows way. Signed out of Drive? The Connect Google Drive button is right there waiting.

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