Plugins are Awesome

[00:02] (external link, opens in new tab) Okay, this is a very cool part of Total Commander. Total Commander has a lot of plugins and add-ons and there are three types of plugins that you can connect to it. One type is called packer extensions or compression extensions. So if there is any kind of file that's not by default supported by total commander such as 7-Zip ISO files, GIF images, anything you would want to drill into but you can't but you want to treat that file like a folder and here is total commander.

[00:34] (external link, opens in new tab) Let's say that I want to treat MSI files like here like and I want to browse inside and I want to be able to use them as if they're zip files. Well, I can download an extension for MSIs. So, let me scroll here. This is the ghisler.com where on the plugins page, I can download this MSI extension. I already downloaded because I tested it before I did the video.

[01:05] (external link, opens in new tab) And the way you install it, the simplest way is to literally go to the the zip file that you just downloaded that contains the extension and using total commander just go in just click enter type enter on inside to get inside the extension zip file. Now, Total Commander is smart enough to recognize that this is an extension and then asks if we want to install it.

[01:37] (external link, opens in new tab) So, we're going to click yes and we're just going to click okay on the next on the next things. It asks us where to install it and we do want to install it where total commander is installed and we want to associate MSI with this extension and we want to say MSP files with this extension. So we click okay again and now it's installed. If I now click backspace we will see that suddenly the MSI files

[02:10] (external link, opens in new tab) Don't look like MSI files anymore. Although that's the extension, they kind of look like zip files. I can actually click type enter. And we can go into the MSI file here. And as I click into the internal CAB file, it unzips it into a cache, goes in. And here I have full access to all the files. I can for example on the right side create some unmsied folder

[02:43] (external link, opens in new tab) And copy maybe all the DLL files with alt plus and F5 to that folder and I can go back up and back up again and now without installing anything I have access to all to all the files I wanted. So that's an example of a packer extension. The second type of extension is a file system extension. You see we can use the panes to browse a file system like disk drives or CD drives or network drives.

[03:17] (external link, opens in new tab) But we can also create custom things to explore. For example, we can explore data sources like databases through total commander with an extension. We can explore Excel files. We can explore Windows audio files. We can listen to them etc. We can even and in unofficial extensions we can explore active directory and permissions uninstall

[03:47] (external link, opens in new tab) Programs directly from total commander. So there's a lot of access there. And the third type is Lister extensions. Lister is the quick view. Basically, when I clicked Ctrl Q, I got access to the Lister. As an example, if I want to see the recent pictures on my Dropbox, so let's see,

[04:23] (external link, opens in new tab) Picks here. Oh, we don't have any. But basically when I click control Q here the stuff on the left is my viewer. Okay. So I can see the content of files and I can see a lot of interesting things such as icons and things like that or just information on files. But here I can for example add stuff that's not by default supported. For example, I can view flash files, custom images,

[04:55] (external link, opens in new tab) Audio specialtity files, faster image viewers, a lot of different things. I can even see, for example, CAD files. So, there's a lot of different things that we can do. Now, let's say we want to uninstall an extension. This is not very easy, not very intuitive, but let's say I wanted to get rid of one of my extensions. I can go to configuration options packer configure packer extensions and I'll select one of the one of the extensions that's supported and let's say MSI

[05:30] (external link, opens in new tab) And I want MSI to no longer be supported. So I'll just click none and click okay. Now I'll go to the second extension MSP. Click none and okay. And voila, now MSI looks like an MSI again and I can no longer browse into it. So that's how you install and uninstall extensions.