FreeCommander Forum

I desperately miss the feature of free arrange of icons and folder and keep this free arrangement like known from desktop. Win10 (Update 1703) was the last version which supported it in Explorer. In any newer version the free arranged symbols get mixed after closing the folder.

It seems there is no file explorer with this feature, but many people are missing it, since it make it much more productive to work!

Thank you.

Aaa, yes- the free arrangement on desktop on the Windows operating system...

...be it XP, Windows 7 or Windows 10- at some point the icons get rearranged, be it becuase of changed resolution, tampering with docked windows or multiple screens. And so the whole work put into it gets thrown out of the window [pun intended]

Free arrange on desktop is no problem. There are also tools like "Desktop save and restore" to rearrange icons after they got mixtured.

I am looking for free arrangement of icons in explorer

XnView MP has this feature (it's an image viewer, but you can view any files, it's free for personal usage).

@Dreamer Thank you. I just installed XnView MP, but I cannot see how to free arrage and place folders and files. Can you please let me know what I miss? Thx

Menu > View > Sort by > Custom.

BTW It works for files and folders, but after program restart only files order is preserved, possibly a bug.

Thank you, but is it not possible to place files or folder free on screen. I only can change the sequence/order of them.
But yes the program remembers the order.

Any idea how to place the icons free like on desktop? like there are invisible grate / raster on complete space?

Thank you.

It's OT, but you can try to create a feature request in the other program, perhaps it would be easier to implement there, since custom order is possible there already.

I'm not sure if it's possible to implement this feature in FC, request is here, so you can just wait, or perhaps try to explain how it would be working and why you need it - do you need it just for one folder, few folders, or all folders?

Thank you. Do you see no chance to make it possible in FreeCommander?

I don't know, you need to ask Marek.

I have no plans for such function.

If you can find the time - some day - I would be very thankful

I also can see a usefulness for such option

Marek wrote: ↑30.09.2019, 20:18 I have no plans for such function.

But this function is already built in; kind of



If I am not mistaken, then If the user have selected option available as

Settings > View > File / folder list > Refresh > Add new items at the end of the list

then the user can create custom order - until this Tab or the whole FreeCommander gets refreshed somehow

I use this as a workaround when I have multiple files that I want to put them in order- and then I use the Counter code from the Multi Rename feature window [available with CTRL + M] on all of them to preserve that order. This saves me a lot of time, because I do not have to add the numbers manually to the front of those files, one by one or group by group- instead of that I just move files from Panel 1 which shows me content of folder A to the Panel 2 which shows me content of a folder B


So in theory all that would have to done right now to implement the feature suggested by the user guru1d is addition of new option

Settings > View > File / folder list > Refresh > Preserve not-refreshed view for ever (keeps custom order of files)

That of not-refreshed view would have to be written down to some file of course. And then it would have to be update every time we do something in such folder. This maybe this option could be also activated / deactivated for a single folder and / or its sub-folders if the use chooses so

In overall, this would be a mix of something like a playlist of files and indexing of folders


Or did guru1d suggest a more advanced feature: a free graphical placement of thumbnails? Because my description is for a file list view a not for a thumbnails view

I prefer this function in "icons"-view