Tandem Commander
Tandem Commander is a fast, keyboard-friendly two-panel file manager for Windows. It is based on Open Salamander, the GPLv2 open-source release of the long-lived Altap Salamander file manager. Everything about the original project — its history, features, documentation, and community — lives in the upstream repository; this README covers what makes Tandem Commander different and how to build it.
Current version: 0.2.0 (released 2026-10-25) — every release is described in CHANGELOG.md.
Website: tandemcommander.org
Issues: github.com/tandemcommander/tandemcommander/issues
What's Different from Open Salamander
- Names in any language, paths of any length. File and folder names are handled as Unicode throughout the program and its plugins — in panels, dialogs, archives, the command line, the clipboard and drag-and-drop — and long paths open everywhere. A name that does not fit is refused, never silently cut.
- Panel tabs. Each panel can keep several directories open in tabs, each with its own view, sort order, filter, selection and history, restored at the next start; optional browser-like shortcuts and Reopen Closed Tab.
- Quick search that filters. Typing finds the text anywhere in a name, also without its accents, and shows only the matching items.
- New viewers and plugins. A Code Viewer with syntax highlighting for over 200 languages and formats, a Markdown Viewer, and an SFTP plugin for SSH servers. RAR archives open and unpack without installing anything (7-Zip engine 26.03), and external archivers work.
- Command Shell of your choice.
Num / opens Command Prompt, Windows PowerShell, PowerShell 7, Windows Terminal, Git Bash or any program you name.
- Your Salamander settings come along. Options → Import Settings from Salamander brings hot paths, FTP connections, the user menu and other settings over from Altap Salamander or Open Salamander after a preview; the old settings are only read.
- Safer with your data. A long series of fixes closes ways of losing files around archives, disc images, file operations, FTP, SFTP and the Registry Editor — for example, Delete archive after unpacking keeps an archive that was not extracted whole.
- Modern distribution. A signed installer and uninstaller, the Windows Package Manager (winget), unattended installation, no separate Visual C++ runtime needed, and an update check that tells you about a new version (one request to GitHub about once a day, nothing about you is sent, one option turns it off).
- Translations. English plus Czech, Dutch, French, German, Hungarian, Romanian, Slovak and Spanish.
Installing
Download the signed installer from the Releases page and run it. Windows 11 or newer, 64-bit.
The application is also published in the Windows Package Manager catalogue as PavelStupka.TandemCommander, so it can be installed and kept up to date with:
winget install tandemcommander
winget upgrade tandemcommander
It installs for all users, into Program Files, and asks for administrator rights the same way the installer does.
Upgrading from 0.1.x: at the first start of 0.2.0 the settings are copied once to a key that no longer changes with the version (see the note on naming below). Going back to 0.1.x afterwards is not supported.
Why This Project Exists — A Personal Note
Whenever I have worked on Windows, there has always been a Salamander close at hand. First Servant Salamander, later Altap Salamander — in my view one of the finest pieces of software I have ever worked with. But the last released version of Altap Salamander dates back to 2019, and it still carries a few aches inherited from the original versions: incomplete encoding support, missing long directory and file path support, and quite a few others. At the same time, many of my friends and family members use Altap Salamander every day, both at work and at home.
The moment Salamander was released as Open Salamander, I had a clear vision: I would adapt it for myself so I could simply keep using it. That vision quickly ran into hard reality — even though I am a very experienced software engineer, developer, and architect, I was missing the one factor a project of this scale demands above all else: time.
That has changed, essentially within the last few months, with the overall shift in how software can now be — not programmed, but created — with agentic systems. To be clear, I am emphatically not talking about "vibe coding"; I consider that a bit of a buzzword and I do not like it. The term I would choose is Full Agentic Spec-Driven Development: clearly defined procedures not just for producing code, but for producing the entire project — documentation and artifacts included. This project is deliberately built with the spec-driven approach on top of GitHub SpecKit, using the best agentic models available at the time, with reviews also carried out independently by models of other vendors.
Tandem Commander is, of course, not perfect. But thanks to this approach I ended up with a genuinely usable tool — one that I hope can serve others as well.
This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗
