Handy File Tool offers you a versatile selection of file-related utilities for free. Its search, replace, and rename tools are highly flexible, allowing you to design complex masks capable of locating and replacing or renaming multiple files and folders with the highest level of accuracy. Besides, it is also capable of finding and replacing strings inside specific files. Its restore points and backup files guarantee that no change is made permanent without your authorization.
At a different level, Handy File Tool can also copy, create, move, and delete files and folders quickly and in the most flexible way. However, it is the rename and replace functionality that makes this free tool stand out from the rest. It supports ANSI, UTF-8, and Unicode character sets, and can replace, insert, and delete specific text strings in any filename or document built using those char sets. Manually selected files and those resulting from your various searches can be thrown into a “basket”, a kind of temporary repository that you can use to refine your file searches and selections. A truly useful concept, especially when dealing with large amounts of files located in various drives and folders.
This plethora of features and possibilities has also its small drawbacks – the program’s interface did not strike me as intuitive and easy to use, contrary to what the website says. However, this is nothing but the logical consequence of offering so much functionality and of providing the user with the highest level of flexibility possible. Thus, far from seeing this as a “true problem”, I see it just as one of the collateral disadvantages that excellence brings.
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