How to use RFCommand

Every launch opens with a welcome screen that shows the version and what is new while RFCommand loads behind it. Press Continue to start, or tick Automatically close this screen after startup and it steps aside on its own as soon as loading finishes. The very first time, the same screen shows the licence agreement, which you accept to continue.

Across the middle of the window are the two panels, which are the heart of it: one is active, the other is not, and almost every command acts from the active one to the other. Above them are the menu and an optional toolbar. Below them are the console prompt and the action bar, one button for each key from F1 to F9.

The single most useful key to learn first is Tab, which swaps which panel is active. The second is F5, which copies whatever is selected in the active panel to whatever folder the other panel is showing.

Why you would use it. These nine cover almost everything you do in a day. Learning them is the difference between using RFCommand and being fast with it. You can click the buttons or press the keys, and both do the same thing.

The captions change with context. Each button names its action followed by the key it is bound to, such as Copy F5, so the bar stays right after you rebind a key. Inside a database, F7 creates a table or a column and F8 becomes Drop or Truncate, because that is what those keys actually do there. When Quick View has the focus, the whole bar becomes the preview's own keys. Anything that does not apply where you are is greyed out, so the bar always tells you the truth about what will happen.

A few more worth learning early.

Why you would use it. Nothing in RFCommand connects on its own. You choose what each panel shows, and from then on a drive, a server, a cloud drive and a database all answer to the same keys.

The Connections menu reaches the same place. Pick a source type to see its saved connections. Connect saves the one you chose and opens it in the active panel, and OK only saves it. A connection can be set to ask for its password each time instead of saving one, which is useful on a shared computer.

Network lists the computers, shares, printers and other devices on your local network as they are found.

When a source is not there. A panel that cannot show a listing tells you why rather than going blank. Not connected is an offer: the connection has not been opened yet, and Connect opens it. Could not connect offers Retry, Edit Connection and Cancel. Folder is not available means a folder you were already in stopped answering, such as a network share whose server went away, and Cancel takes you to the nearest folder above it that still exists.

The one thing that surprises people. Moving the cursor never changes what is selected. In Explorer, arrowing down throws away your selection. Here it does not. You can pick five files from different parts of a long list, scroll past them, look at something else, and they are still selected. Selection is something you do deliberately with Space or Insert. When nothing is selected, a command acts on the item under the cursor.

Click a column header to sort by it. Each tab can also have its own filter (View menu, Filter), for example to show only log files. The panel keeps itself current: when another program adds or changes files in the folder you are looking at, the list updates on its own.

Copying and moving. Select what you want in the active panel, point the other panel at where it should go, and press F5 to copy or F6 to move. That works between any two sources: disk to cloud, archive to FTP, database to disk. A progress dialog shows the current file, the total, the speed and the time remaining.

When something is in the way. If a file already exists you are offered overwrite, rename, auto-rename, skip, or skip all. If something fails you are offered retry, skip, skip all, or abort. Nothing is decided silently on your behalf.

Long jobs. Press Queue (F2) on the confirmation or in the progress window and the job moves to a background queue, which works through jobs one at a time while you keep using the window. This is what you want for a large upload: start it, send it to the queue, carry on.

Deleting. F8 or Delete deletes. In Settings you choose whether that means the Recycle Bin, which is the default, or a permanent delete, and every confirmation says which it will be. Shift+F8 or Shift+Delete deletes permanently just this once. An FTP server, a cloud drive, a database or the inside of an archive has no Recycle Bin, so a delete there is permanent and the confirmation says so rather than promising a bin that is not there.

Clipboard and dragging. Ctrl+C, Ctrl+X and Ctrl+V work, and they work with Explorer and Outlook too. Dragging moves within a drive and copies between drives, with Shift to force a move and Ctrl to force a copy.

Comparing two folders. Shift+F2 compares the folders in the two panels and selects what differs: on each side, the files that are newer than the other side's copy or missing from it. Press F5 next and only those are copied, which is the quickest way to bring a backup up to date. In Settings you choose how thorough it is, from size and date only up to reading the contents of local files, and how much clock difference to ignore.

Administrator rights, only when needed. When Windows refuses a step for lack of rights, RFCommand offers to carry out just that step with elevation, after the usual Windows prompt, and the application itself keeps running normally. Where a step cannot be handed over on its own, it offers to restart as administrator instead, keeping your tabs.

Why you would use tabs. Each panel takes as many tabs as you like, and each remembers its own location and filter. Keep your working folder, your archive, your server and your database open at once and switch between them instead of navigating back and forth.

Ctrl+T opens a new tab on the same location and Ctrl+W closes it. Right-click a tab for the rest: duplicate it, send a copy to the other panel, move it, pin it so that no bulk close will touch it, or close several at once.

A tab in the background never contacts its source until you click it. That matters: an FTP server that is down or a database that is unreachable will not slow down or interrupt your launch, it just sits there until you go to it.

Shaping the window. The toolbar, either panel, the console and the action bar can each be shown or hidden. Ctrl+O hides both panels so you see the console alone, and Ctrl+F1 or Ctrl+F2 collapses the left or right panel. Tabs can sit at the top, bottom, left or right. Drag the splitter between the panels, or right-click it for a 30, 50 or 70 percent split.

When you have it the way you like, choose Save Layout from the Layouts menu, or have it saved every time you exit. Your open tabs, their paths and the active panel are restored the next time you launch.

Why you would use named layouts. Most people work in more than one way. Keep a layout for each project, with its source folder, its build output and its server already open in the right panels, and another for presenting, with a large font and the right cloud drives in place. Switching between them is one click, and tomorrow each one is exactly where you left it.

A layout is everything inside the window: the tabs in both panels and the folders they show, servers and cloud drives included, each tab's view and sort order, the splitter, which panels, console and bars are showing, and the look, meaning the font, icon size, theme, accent, hidden files and language.

Open the Layouts menu, or press Ctrl+Alt+L, and pick a layout to switch to it. The one RFCommand starts in is called Default. New Layout asks for a name first and starts the new layout from what is on screen, so name it, arrange it, then choose Save Layout. Save Layout saves whichever layout is showing, Default included, and Manage Layouts renames, deletes and reorders them.

A layout only changes when you save it. Switch away from one you have changed and RFCommand asks whether to save it first, and going back to Default brings it back as you last saved it. A layout's font, theme and other display settings apply only while it is showing, so your own preferences are never changed by it, and the window stays where you put it. RFCommand always starts in Default, and a tab on a server or cloud drive comes back offering to connect rather than connecting on its own.

Why you would use it. One dialog, opened with Alt+F7, searches whatever kind of source you are looking at. Local disk, network share, FTP, cloud drive, the contents of an archive, or a database. You do not have to remember a different tool for each.

The basics. A name pattern with wildcards, one or more locations separated by semicolons, and text to look for inside the files. You can restrict it to files or to folders, include sub-folders or not, and limit it to what you have already selected. Case sensitivity, whole-word matching and regular expressions are all available.

The advanced tab is where the useful narrowing lives: an exclude pattern, a minimum and maximum size, a modified-after and modified-before date, a cap on how much of each file to scan, and a switch to search inside archives. Binary files are skipped by default so you are not wading through noise.

Working with the results. The window stays open and the search keeps running while you work. Enter takes the panel to the item, F3 and F4 view and edit it, and the buttons along the bottom copy, move, delete or run what you selected. Search in results runs a new search over just what was found, which is how you narrow every log file down to the ones that mention an error. The text you searched for is then waiting in the find box (Ctrl+F) of the viewer and the editor.

Searching a database is different, on purpose. RFCommand searches it as a database, running one query per table or view, rather than scanning the folder-shaped view of it. Searching by name matches real objects, so databases, tables, views, columns, indexes, triggers, procedures and functions, and never the generated files that represent them.

Quick View. Ctrl+Q turns the other panel into a preview that follows your cursor. A file shows its contents, a folder or a database object gets a details page whose counts fill in as they are worked out, and an archive shows what is inside it before you open it. Press Tab to move into the preview: the action bar then shows the preview's own keys, and F2 opens what you are previewing in the editor, with the preview refreshing the moment you save.

Counting a large folder is instant on your own disk but slow on a cloud drive or an FTP server, so by default the folder and archive summaries are built for local items only. Settings, Folder & Archive Details changes that.

The viewer. F3 opens the full viewer, which has five modes and opens each file straight into the right one.

Tail mode is Ctrl+T. It appends only what is newly written and stays pinned to the end, which is what you want while watching a log. Ctrl+R reloads, F11 goes full screen, and every mode prints with Ctrl+P. Saving in RFCommand's own editor reloads a viewer that is showing the same file, and an optional setting reloads it when another program changes the file too.

There is an option to work out the type from the content rather than the extension, so a picture that someone saved with the wrong extension still opens as a picture. The viewer works on any source, so you can read a file on an FTP server or inside an archive without copying it out first.

Why you would use it. F4 opens the built-in editor. Its point is that it can save straight back to wherever the file came from, so you can fix a config file on an FTP server, or a text file inside a zip, without the download, edit, re-upload dance. Shift+F4 creates a new file and opens it.

It has syntax highlighting for common languages and data formats, with a Syntax menu if it guesses wrong, and the colours follow your light or dark theme. A margin down the side marks which lines you have changed since the last save. There is also SQL and general formatting for when a file arrives as one long line.

Spell checking is under View, Spell Check. Pick English (US) or English (UK) and misspelled words get a red wavy underline; right-click one for suggestions. It starts off in each new editor window, so it never gets in the way of code or a config file. To check another language, put a Hunspell dictionary pair, such as fr.dic and fr.aff, in the Dictionaries folder inside %APPDATA%\Rational Forge\RFCommand and it appears in the same menu. The folder holds a short note on where to find free dictionaries.

Grid mode is the one to remember. Open a data file with F6 and you edit its cells directly, like a spreadsheet. On a database table's data file, saving merges your rows back by primary key rather than replacing the lot.

The editor loads the whole file into memory, so for a very large file use the viewer instead. There is a preference to send editing to an external editor of your choice if you would rather.

Why you would use it. Ctrl+M renames a whole selection, or a whole folder, from one pattern. Nothing is renamed until you press Rename, so the preview is your dry run.

The Name and Extension boxes start as $N and $E, which reproduce the original name exactly, so you only change the part you want. The Insert button beside each box lists every variable with an example of what it gives right now.

Those details are read from the file itself, so they work on a cloud drive, over FTP and inside an archive too. For example, to name a folder of holiday photos by the day they were taken, select them, press Ctrl+M, set the name to $YYYY-$MM-$DD $N and the Date source to Date taken.

Case changes, and search and replace as plain text or a regular expression, are there when you need them. The Status column shows what will happen to each item, and a name that would be invalid or would clash with another stops the rename until you fix it or tick Skip problem items. Undo puts back the last rename, and Presets keep a pattern you use often.

Why you would use it. Press Enter on a zip and you are inside it, in a normal panel, with normal keys. Copy files in, copy files out, or copy from one archive straight into another, even one sitting on an FTP server. Nothing is unpacked to a temporary folder behind your back, and .. at the top takes you back out.

Zip, 7z, tar, tgz and tbz2 open for reading and writing. Rar, ace, arj and arc open read-only, so you can copy out of them freely but not into them, and a read-only format tells you so once, up front, rather than failing file by file. Disk images open the same way and are always read-only: iso, vhd, vhdx, vmdk, vdi and xva. That is on purpose, because a half-written change inside a virtual disk leaves a disk that will not start.

Creating one. Select what you want, press Alt+F5, and choose the format. Zip, tgz and tbz2 let you set the compression level, and zip can be encrypted with AES-256, AES-128 or the older ZipCrypto. The same key can also create a SQLite database from the selection.

Password-protected archives. You are prompted when you open one, and prompted again if the password was wrong, rather than being shown an empty folder or an error.

Two things worth knowing. If more than one handler can open a file type, you get a chooser and can save your pick as the default for that extension, reopening the chooser later with Ctrl+Alt+Enter. And because some documents are really archives underneath, Shift+Enter always bypasses browsing and just runs the file, so a Word document opens in Word.

By default an archive is recognised by its extension. Turn on Detect containers by content in Settings and a real archive with the wrong extension still opens, and Mark browse-able files puts a small orange bar after the extension of every file that Enter will step into.

Setting one up. Add a connection from the Connections menu with the host, your username and your password. Encryption can be left on automatic, which tries FTPS and falls back to plain FTP if the server does not offer it, or forced to explicit or implicit TLS. Passive or active mode, a timeout and text encoding are all there if you need them.

Then it is just a panel. Copy with F5, view with F3, edit with F4 and save straight back. You can even open an archive that lives on the server and work inside it, and the console answers the familiar commands, such as cd, dir, copy and del, right there on the server.

If you save the password it is encrypted with Windows' own per-user protection before it is written, and it is tied to your Windows account. You can always decline to save it and be asked each time.

If the connection fails, the panel offers Retry and Edit Connection rather than emptying itself.

RFCommand supports FTP and FTPS. It does not currently support SFTP over SSH.

Which ones. OneDrive, Google Drive and Dropbox, all readable and writable.

Signing in. Add the connection and RFCommand opens your browser at the provider's own sign-in page. You type your password there, on their site, never into RFCommand. When you approve it you land on a confirmation page and can close the tab. A renewable token is stored, encrypted, on your machine, so you do not have to sign in every time.

Then it is just a panel. Copy in both directions with F5, preview with Ctrl+Q, search it with Alt+F7. Large uploads use resumable sessions, so a dropped connection does not mean starting again.

Google Drive works file by file. RFCommand can see the files and folders it created itself and anything you choose to share with it, and nothing else in your Drive. To work with files that are already there, click Choose files in Google Drive... in the connection dialog. Google's own file picker opens in your browser, and whatever you pick becomes available. Items that do not belong in a folder RFCommand can already see appear in a folder called Shared with RFCommand.

Google Docs, Sheets, Slides and Drawings have no file of their own, so they are shown with the extension of the format they copy as, such as Report.docx, and converted when you view or copy them. The first copy asks which format you want. Viewing uses a readable format automatically, or asks each time if you turn that on in Settings.

A delete on Google Drive or Dropbox goes to the provider's own trash, so a mistake can still be undone on their website.

Which ones. SQLite files open like an archive, by pressing Enter on the file. SQL Server, MySQL and PostgreSQL open as live connections you set up from the Connections menu.

The idea. Tables are folders. Rows and columns are files. The schema is a document you can read. Everything is produced the moment you look at it, so it is never out of date, and writing one of those files really does change the database.

What the keys mean in here. The action bar relabels itself, because the operations are different.

Getting data out. Copy a database to a folder on disk and you get a complete, portable, readable export, including a schema file, the rows, and a diagram file you can paste into a database diagramming site to get an entity relationship picture.

Getting data in. Copy that folder into another database and it is rebuilt, even on a different engine and under a different name. Tables, column types, primary keys, foreign keys with their cascade rules, indexes, auto-increment and all the rows always survive. Views, triggers and stored routines survive when the engines match, and are attempted when they do not, with a report of anything that could not be carried across. You can also copy a CSV, JSON or XML file into the Tables folder to import it as a new table, or select some and press Alt+F5 to make a new SQLite database from them.

Right-click is worth exploring. Copy a table's schema as JSON, as a diagram definition, as portable SQL or as this engine's own SQL. Copy the data as CSV or XML. Copy a ready-made SELECT statement or a column list. Empty a table, or compact a SQLite database.

Two deliberate absences. Nothing is ever cached from a database, so you are never shown a stale row that another connection has already changed. And there is no properties dialog inside a database, because nothing in there is a real file and its attributes would have to be invented. Press F3 instead.

Why you would use it. There is a prompt under the panels, always bound to the folder the active panel is showing. You do not have to open a terminal and navigate back to where you already are. Just start typing while the file list has focus and the characters go to the prompt.

It runs real Windows commands through a real terminal, with full colour output, so batch files, PowerShell and command-line tools all behave as they should. cd moves the panel along with the prompt: type a drive letter such as D: to change drive, or a connection number such as 2: to switch to another connection of the same kind.

The clever part. When the active panel is inside a database, what you type at the prompt is SQL, run against that database, and the result comes back as a table. Statements that change data really do change it. On an FTP server, a cloud drive or inside an archive there is no Windows shell to run, so the console answers the familiar commands itself: cd, dir, type, tree, md, rd, del, ren, copy, move and more.

Why you would use it. Alt+F8 opens a small web API client, so you can try a call without leaving RFCommand or installing anything else. The first time, it holds a sample project of public APIs to learn with.

Calls are kept as projects, groups and requests. A project is one API and holds the base address and the variables its requests share. A group can set a variable again for the requests under it, so one group can point at a test server while the rest point at the live one. Variables go in double braces, such as {{token}}.

Send shows the status, the time it took and how much came back, with the body in the same viewer as F3, so a JSON array can be read as a table. A header holding a token can be marked Secret: it is encrypted when saved and left out when you export.

Right-click a request to copy it as a curl command or a PowerShell script, or paste one in (Ctrl+V in the tree) to turn it into a saved request. Changes are kept when you press Save, and closing with unsaved changes asks first.

Key bindings. Settings, then Key Bindings. There are 47 actions you can rebind, split into main window commands and file list commands. Each takes a main shortcut and an optional second one. Click a box and press the combination you want. Esc always cancels the capture, which is why Esc itself cannot be bound.

Conflicts are detected before you can save, and it will not let you leave an action with no key at all. You can reset one binding or all of them, and there is a master switch to fall back to the defaults while keeping your own set for later. Only your changes are stored, so a future version cannot invalidate your file, and new actions arrive with their defaults already set.

Everything follows your bindings. The menu shortcut hints and the captions on the action bar all show your key, not the factory one. The tab keys (Ctrl+T, Ctrl+W and Alt+Down) and the keys inside the viewer, editor, search and console are fixed for now.

Appearance. Light or dark, and twenty-four accent colours. Six are the originals: blue, red, green, orange, black and white. Sixteen more are warm earth tones, eight light (linen, sand, wheat, honey, apricot, clay, dusty rose and sage) and eight dark (ochre, copper, terracotta, rust, mahogany, chestnut, umber and moss). The last two are the Rational Forge brand colours, and those two also restyle the window surfaces rather than only the highlights. Changes apply immediately, with no restart.

Language. English, Afrikaans, Spanish, French and Russian. The interface retranslates live when you switch.

Finding a setting. Preferences has a search box at the top, so typing timeout or hidden finds a setting without knowing where it lives. Everything applies as you change it.

The file list. Choose the font, whether to show icons and at what size, whether to use Windows' own file-type icons, whether to show sync and version-control overlays, whether hidden and system items appear, and whether right-click gives you Windows' menu or RFCommand's own.

Behaviour. What delete means, the copy buffer size, how many times to retry, how long to wait before giving up, how much history to keep, whether to run in the system tray, whether to allow more than one instance, and whether to save your layout when you exit. That last one comes in two: one for Default, on unless you turn it off, and one for a named layout, off unless you turn it on, so a named layout otherwise changes only when you save it.

Your settings, your key bindings, your named layouts, your saved connections and your web API projects are kept in %APPDATA%\Rational Forge\RFCommand, and RFCommand's own log files in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Rational Forge\RFCommand. Both are in your Windows user profile, on your own machine. Nothing is stored anywhere else, and nothing is sent to Rational Forge.

Any password or sign-in token you choose to save is encrypted before it is written, using the protection Windows provides for exactly this, tied to your Windows account. Another account on the same computer cannot read it. You can always decline to save a credential and be asked for it each time instead.

Uninstalling asks whether your settings, saved connections and logs should go too. Say no and a later install picks up where you left off.

The Rational Forge privacy policy sets this out in full.

Bugs and feature requests both go to our issue tracker, where your report gets a number you can follow. Include your RFCommand version from Help then About, your Windows version, and which kind of source was involved.

Please do not paste passwords, connection strings or access tokens into an issue. Issues can be read by other people. Email those instead.