Took the beta for a quick spin and... wow, the speed is truly astonishing!

Windows doesn't feel slow because the kernel or the filesystem is inherently "that" slow, it feels like a sloth overdosing on heroin because nobody at Microsoft gives the slightest crap about making it even a tiny bit faster.

It's staggering how the instant you double-click a file in File Pilot you're... back in the tar pit. (The Windows image preview app just spins... and spins... while it does God-knows-what with my CPUs.)

The contrast of going from one to the other makes the quality difference glaringly obvious.

The Windows filesystem is very slow. It's not the main cause of slowness in Explorer, but it's still a real problem.

Directory Opus has been doing that for decades.

I'm sure it did, but that app looks like a Win XP-era app (not even Win7). FilePilot is fast, looks good & feels modern (support a command palette, fuzzy search, etc). The only downside is that it runs on the GPU and so running it inside a VM is a bit of a hassle.

You can completely customize how it looks.

The reqs are likely a side effect of how the application is built and the fact that its made by a solo dev.

I find it more pleasant to do UI within the context of a video game renderer than to bother with ui libraries and native hooks.

You only have to deal with windows enough to get you a rendering context: then you can do everything in your walled garden.

Hadn't heard that name since the Amiga days and had no idea it was still around!

File pilot seems to use an immediate mode UI to be responsive and uses 10% cpu even when idle or minimized. I'm not sure that's worth it.