Wednesday, August 04, 2004

WinNc.Net - Norton Commander Clone - Filemanager for Windows

WinNc.Net - Norton Commander Clone - Filemanager for Windows
Every so often I get so irritated with Windows XP that I search for anything that would help. Something like ... Norton Commander. NC was a DOS 2.1 (maybe earlier) file management application. It was brilliant. Even OS X isn't quite as good for file management ... ok, OS X is better -- but not THAT much better.

One of the best featurse of NC was it built a tree of directories, so one could navigate instantly based on character matching.

Under OS/2 I used FileCommander, an NC clone, but it didn't quite make the transition to Win2K.

Today I came across this Norton Commander clone. I'll give it a try. XP's file manager was never very good, and it's completely collapsed in the face of my hard drive.

Now if only Google toolbar would add the ##@! full text indexing we were promised. (I hear MSN might get there first ...)

Of course Longhorn is supposed to solve all these problems. I'm not holding my breath.

Update: Uh-oh. There's no "norton change directory". The DOS version of NC built a directory tree index, one could navigate to a folder/directory through a dynamic string match (type more characters, jump around the tree. The author of WinNC.net is very responsive --he says they've received few requests for this feature. A classic problem with customer-driven product development -- the customer can't ask for what they can't imagine. NCD/NC was a work of genius.

WCD is a cross-platform text-only command line implementation of NCD. I think it could be nicely integrated with WinNC.Net and I've suggested that. In the meantime I'm going to see if I can figure a way for WCD to drive Windows Explorer.

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