One of the most unproductive feature of using windows for development is the lack of tabbed windows explorer.
By the end of day (if the day is bad) and the developer needed to do some source(soul!) searching, one can typically see that we have at-least 10-20 explorer windows open, most of it is the same window that is already open some-where. The search gets very frustrating specially if ‘group windows’ option is enabled.
There are some really worthy tab based explorer replacement options available and they are free to use. They do only what they claim. The most popular one is the QtTabbar. Virtually unknown to the world is a chrome like tabbed explorer called ‘Clover’ that is a worthy option. It doesn’t come with all the bells and whistles unlike other explorer replacements. Only ad-don I feel that is missing probably can be made available by installing a Microsoft Power Toy for windows called ‘Command Here‘.
QtTabbar needs no introduction as it is quite popular amongst free tab based file explorers. Here is how it looks on windows XP.
There is virtually no configuration required and it is up and running after the install. Beware some AV could raise a false positive on the installer. It is totally safe.
You can download Clover here . Original site is here(in chinese perhaps).
I personally use qttabbar with windows explorer. works like a charm.
Clover works better when compared to qttabbar for me.