Description: Accelman is a dual-pane "File Manager" with a wide set of features ranging from multiple file management panes to a full-featured image viewer and editor, archiver with support of 15+ formats, media player and playlist editor, as well as a host of file and folder management tools.

Accelman, which used to be a paid program but just turned freeware, is a so-called dual pane file manager (commonly also referred to as a "Windows Explorer Replacement"). It brings together one of the most thorough and impressive range of features that you can get for a program in this category; however, because of the extensive features, I will resist making this review into a re-iteration of the features list and attempt a more holistic description. Therefore this review will be structured into (a) a PROS section, (b) a CONS section, and (c) a listing of my top 10 favorite features that Accelman provides.

1- PROS:

Multiple panes: with the ability to drag-and-drop to arrange them. It also comes with pre-set defaults that emulate the layout of other popular file managers, and will let you save your layout scheme for later use.

One stop shop for most file types: Accelman includes a built in image viewer/editor, a zip/archiving program, and a text editor/viewer with syntax highlighting. All of these are above average in their own right and support numerous formats (note: this does not preclude using an external app if you want to). It also incorporates a playlist manager and a surprisingly versatile media player. And, if you have Acrobat Reader or MS Office installed, can be used to view PDF and Office files.

Sophisticated file management tools: such as filtering throughout, mass renaming, searching for folders, files, or text, the ability to take directory snapshots for later comparison, folder bookmarking, batch file-attributes editor, files merge/split, folders comparison, changing file associations, etc.

2- CONS: (and wish list)

Less might have been more: ironically, this program has so many features as to make you (at times) wish for less. Does a file manager really need a built in media player?

Unintuitive design: this program has a learning curve. Unless you are willing to fiddle around with it endlessly you will need to dig into the help section in order to figure out how to perform some operations.

Wish list:

The option to supersede Windows explorer. In the sense that you could click on a folder and have it open in Accelman rather than explorer.

Filtering: for some reason my filtered file results always included compressed archives (.ZIP, .RAR, etc). Not sure if this is a bug or if I simply couldn't figure out how to keep those out.

Media player: audio files would end abruptly mid-way through. A bug?

PDF: native PDF viewing would have been cool, and/or the ability to specify an external PDF viewer aside from Acrobat Reader.

One thing that would have been cool is if some of the components (e.g. the media player) came in the form of optional plugins or add-ons.