Using 4Pane  Using 4Pane   Contents  Contents   Menu Sections  Menu Sections

The Display

You can change the appearance of 4Pane considerably, but when you first run it you will see four panes, arranged side by side in pairs. The lefthand pane of each pair shows only directories (the dir-view). When you select one of those directories, its contents (both files and subdirectories) are displayed in the righthand pane (the file-view).

The panes are separated by draggable sashes, so you can adjust their sizes as you need. Each twin-pane is always split vertically, but you can choose to display one twin-pane above the other, or even to hide one of them. Initially each twin-pane displays your home directory, but of course you can change this. You can also create extra pages of panes: see the Tabs menu.

Unlike some file managers, 4Pane doesn't keep checking for changes in the part of the filesystem that its displaying. However you can refresh the currently-selected pane at any time by clicking Refresh on the Context Menu, or by pressing F5.

You can read more about panes in the View Menu and Fileview columns.


Below the panes you can choose to display a Terminal Emulator. This also automatically appears to display the results when you use Search commands: see Tools.

As you'd expect, 4Pane has a Menu, a Toolbar and a Statusbar.

Having got 4Pane organised as you wish, you can save the settings from the Options menu. You can also configure many aspects of the display from the Configure menu.