Converting Eudora email archives -- the end is near (and Norton Commander ncmail.exe in a footnote)

I have years of email messages locked up in a 1.2 GB Eudora for Windows archive [3]. Converting them has been a pending project for about 10 years. This archive is a part of my extended memory; it has the keys to remembering people and places now forgotten.

Now time is running out. Eudora Mailbox Cleaner is one of the best tools for this project, and it's PPC only. Since Lion doesn't have Rosetta, the app won't run on 10.7 or higher. [1]

I've downloaded a copy. I think I'll delay my primary machine's Lion conversion until the Eudora conversion is done.

There are other Eudora archive conversion methods, but most run on Windows -- and I think Windows VMs on Mac will fade away as Apple locks the OS down to both block malware and enforce DRM. Time is passing. If you have old archives, you may have only a year or so to (relatively) easily convert them.

I'm planning to create a user account to test the import, then backup up my current Mail database prior to adding this one.

See also:

• Gordon's Tech: Converting Eudora email
• Gordon's Tech: Converting Email from Eudora OS X to a modern format - the TidBITS review: Adam Engst's comprehensive guide

Update

It took a few hours to do the conversion; most of that was spent waiting for a bundled AppleScript to Rebuild Mailboxes. Post conversion the database is 2.4 GB and over 55,000 messages.

Follow the directions carefully. I didn't think the nicknames were worth converting until I saw them; the connections between Groups and Members turned out to have powerful memory value. I recommend testing first with a special user and an empty address book and email account. If you import into an existing Mail database be sure to backup ~/Library/Mail first.

I didn't import Filters. They'd just be noise now.

With OS 10.4 and later there's an essential 'Mailbox Rebuild' step. My Eudora had at least 478 folders across a deep hierarchy [2]. It would have been extremely tedious to try to rebuild them all. So I tried the 10.4-10.5 rebuild AppleScript, even though I am running 10.7 Snow Leopard. 

That script runs slowly, and because of the way UI Scripting work it must own the entire machine. It will steal focus. Don't try to even switch users. It took over an hour to complete. Thank Darwin it's there; the job would have been untenable without it.

As per the documentation (mandatory read):

Your imported mailboxes will be located in a new folder called "Import" at the top-level of your local mailboxes. The new files will be located at "~/Library/Mail/Mailboxes/Import" on your hard disk...

... due to the way the Address Book works, a new group will be created for each Eudora nickname which expands to more than one email address.

I've already leveraged the archive to rebuild memories of people I worked and corresponded with in the 1990s. Some have died, some I've lost touch with. My old Eudora email archive has now been reintegrated into my extended memory.

For now the email archive and my old Address Book are sitting in a distinct user account. I will decide over the next week whether I'm going to leave them there or, more likely, repeat the process. If I do a complete merge I may create yet another user account, copy both my current email archive and this archive there, and let the process run.

OS X mail has a virtually undocumented import Apple Mail Data feature. I don't think it will be practical to import the archive using that but I'll take a look at it. (Update: It seems to have worked quite well. I imported my old Netscape emails at the same time.)

- fn -

[1] A year or two ago our 8 yo G5 iMac hard drive died. I dithered about whether to replace it or not because of the infamous iMac capacitor problem and its slowly delaminating screen. (The G5 iMac was one of Apple's most troublesome machines -- they desperately needed to move to Intel. The heat problems were extreme. It was, however, extremely easy to repair. That was even a marketing feature. Perhaps the G5 iMac is why Apple doesn't design for fixability any more.)

I did replace the drive and it's still working. It can even, if I were to install 10.4, run Classic. It's now one of my most valued machines. I think I may turn our MacBook into the kid machine and put the G5 iMac on a very light duty cycle so I can keep it available for another decade. I'll also archive my software install library onto its now capacious hard drive.

[2] My Gmail archive has essentially 2 mailboxes: In and All. Full text indexing and search changes things.

[3] Created by Steve Dorner, Eudora was the preeminent Mac email software and was dominant for a time on Windows as well. This archive, during its lifetime, moved from Mac to Windows. I found some 1996 correspondence with Steve, he was a very approachable developer with a lot of correspondence!

Before Eudora I used Norton Commander Mail (ncmail.exe) with MCIMail (pre-inernet -- 4867991@mcimail.com was my email at the time.

Writing this post inspired me to look into those archives. I did have them -- zipped up from the days when 200K was a lot of data. OS X couldn't open the old zip archives, but Unarchiver did fine. I used Automator to attach a .txt extension to each file and assigned them to TextWrangler. That was enough to convince OS X to index my old NC email messages. For example:

I actually got a bunch of public domain and shareware Windows applications running SLIP under OS/2 over my 14.4K modem ... 

... The second thing I'm excited about ...) is learning HTML and creating my own home page on the SILS Mosaic connection...

...  for my next 'HOT tip'. Check out TeleScript. Ignore "General Magic" -- it's bogus. TeleScript is the secret pearl.

I didn't remember that 14.4K modems coexisted with HTML 1.x. TeleScript is huge in an alternative reality. GM was a copy co-founded by "Bill Atkinson, Andy Hertzfeld and Marc Porat". Historic names.

The next archive to crack is a set of email written using Netscape's email app. (Update: Mail imports these directly.)

Archiving email

In the 90s Slashdot was hot. There were no blogs, no feeds, just Slashdot and their commenting system.

Even at its peak, however, you could see the problems. There were hordes of comments on stories, but most were worthless. Good comments often arrived late, and were never ranked so never seen. Realtime before its time, and flawed in the same way realtime is now.

Slashdot is still around, but I rarely find anything novel there. Today was different. Someone asked a question I've wondered about for years ..

Ask Slashdot | Best Way To Archive Emails For Later Searching? (Anonymous)

... I have kept every email I have ever sent or received since 1990, with the exception of junk mail (though I kept a lot of that as well). I have migrated my emails faithfully from Unix mail, to Eudora, to Outlook, to Thunderbird and Entourage, though I have left much of the older stuff in Outlook PST files. To make my life easier I would now like to merge all the emails back into a single searchable archive — just because I can. 

But there are a few problems: a) Moving them between email systems is SLOW; while the data is only a few GB, it is hundred of thousands of emails and all of the email systems I have tried take forever to process the data. b) Some email systems (i.e. Outlook) become very sluggish when their database goes over a certain size. c) I don't want to leave them in a proprietary database, as within a few years the format becomes unsupported by the current generation of the software. d) I would like to be able to search the full text, keep the attachments, view HTML emails correctly and follow email chains. e) Because I use multiple operating systems, I would prefer platform independence. f) Since I hope to maintain and add emails for the foreseeable future, I would like to use some form of open standard. So, what would you recommend?'... 

I think I might still have my NCMail (Norton Commander Mail) archives, back before the public internet, when MCIMail was a great services. That was, by the way, one of the best email clients ever written.

Here are some of the suggestions, with my comments:

• Run an IMAP server and host them there
• Notmuch (Linux)
• Gmail
• MailSteward for OS X: Uses SQLite or MySQL and process mbox files from Eudora and Endourage. Works with Mail.app I'm going to see if this can process my PC Eudora files.
• Maildir storage format uses system directories for mail folders and is indexable. It's used by Dovecot IMAP sesrver.
• mairix - email index and search tool (unix)

Sadly, most of the comments are as worthless as I remember, except they degenerate to mod disputes faster than ever.

Incidentally, Sarbanes-Oxley means CEOs can go to jail for corporate malfeasance. This is inspiring corporate rules around email retention and especially email deletion. So the email archive management industry is spinning up.

Update: MailSteward failed Gordon's Law of Software Acquisition #4:

Inspect the uninstaller. The best apps don't need one - just delete the app. After that look for something built into the app. Then look for something that downloads with the app. If there's no installer stop immediately.

MailSteward has an Apple installer, but neither the FAQ or the Manual seem to discuss uninstallation.

That ended my MailSteward evaluation.

How to move files from one web site hosting service to another

I'm working through my migration from Lunarpages to Dreamhost.

I'll have a series of posts outlining what I learn during this migration; it seems like the kind of topic that could sue some sharing.

The first step in my migration was to sign up with Dreamhost. I googled on "dreamhost coupon" and found a code that gave me $50 off, so my 1 year contract cost $70. I have 2 months left on my Lunarpags contract so I can take my time on the migration, transferring one domain at a time.

I haven't told Lunarpages I'm leaving of course; there's no need to muddy the waters. If they care they'll figure it out from the domain transfers anyway.

The next step is to move my files. I figured I'd learn about SSH/Telnet and tar balls -- but Lunarpages doesn't includes SSH with my account.

Lesson: Confident hosting vendors, like Dreamhost, provide services that make it easy to switch -- like Telnet/SSH on every account. You want a confident vendor.

If I did have SSH/Telnet access I'd use the advice in these two posts. The author's site is a bit hard on my eyes, but the content looks good ...

• Raymond.CC website inaccessible - Migration (June 2006)
• Website Hosting Migration (Jan 2006)

So I'm doing the old FTP down and up procedure. Tedious, but I have the time. Once the files are on Dreamhost with a temporary server name I've verify things are working. Then I'll be ready to switch domains.

Update 8/28/08: I figured out a better way. DreamHost has a web based FTP tool, so you can ftp from the old domain to DreamHost. Of course one could always do this from Telnet/SSH -- but I'd forgotten about command line ftp. It's been a long time since I've done that.

Update 8/29/08: Well, the net2ftp web tool was a bust. I couldn't see how to get it to move files from LunarPages to DreamHost -- and there's no documentation. On the other hand, Lunarpages allowed me to download a tar.gz archive of my entire site with one click. Kudos to them, I'd no idea that was possible. So now I'm FTPng it to Dreamhost and I'll see if I can expand it there either from the Net2ftp web interface or by activating my SSH access.

Update 8/30/08: I'm impressed with how worthless most of the online advice and documentation was about this. Here's what worked (thank you Raymond.cc)

1. Go to Lunarpages Backup control panel and click link to download a backup file (tar.gz) of my Lunarpages site.
2. FTP the 640MB archive to my DreamHost directory.
3. Enable Bash SSH access on DreamHost.
4. Download and install Tunnelier for Windows (I did this from my XP machine).
5. SSH to DreamHost and run "tar -xzf backup-faughnan.com-8-29-2008.tar.gz"

At this point everything had been restored, but they were in the wrong folder. So I had to move them. This is where I really missed tools like Norton Commander, never mind Finder or Explorer!

I then used the following Bash commands to rearrange and cleanup (as usual unix documentation is awful):

• rm -r mydirectoryname: removes mydirectoryname and all files it contains
• ls: list directories.
• cd mydirectoryname: change to mydirectoryname. Also use cd .. to move up.
• mv mydirectoryname .. : moves mydirectoryname and all files up one directory level
• mv * .. : move everything in local directory up one level. (There's supposed to be a switch for mv that forces an overwrite of existing files, but it didn't work for directories.)
  

If you want to switch to DreamHost my coupon code of KATEVA will get you the maximal coupon discount of $50 off a 1 year subscription.

Codswallop reader favorite software - including Daylite

Codswallop's reader list of favorite tools is surprisingly good. I recognized most of them, but Daylite is new to me.

I'm surprised I've not heard this integrated productivity suite -- but the $1000 5 user license fee might be part of the reason. Their sync would have to be extremely good to justify even a license for Emily and ($400).

On another note, I was surprised to see Total Commander on the list. It's been a while since I've seen a Norton Commander clone. Those were the days ...

Update 7/24/08: Great comment from Carolyn. If Daylite can't do basic task/calendar integration, how can we take them seriously?

Quick Look - more than I'd thought

I won't have 10.5 for a few months yet, but this is good to file away: 10 ways to get the most out of Quick Look.

I've always liked this kind of functionality. I started out first with Norton Utilities DOS NCView, then the DOS based Norton Commander with integrated NCView (F3 key I think). There was something similar to Windows 95 to, but I can't remember the name of it.

Funny how this sort of capability comes and goes. I hope it stays this time.

Forklift: Norton Commander for OS X

I've never used a file management tool on any OS as good as John Socha's Norton Commander for DOS. Nothing in OS/2, GeoWorks, Commodore, Windows 3, 95/98, NT, 2K, XP, MacOS, OS X, Palm etc. Others must agree, there've been clones for years, including clones of clones by people who don't remember the original (FileCommander for OS/2 came closest to the original).

Norton Commander was like Symantec's MORE 3.1 or GrandView -- software so good it cannot be adequately replicated. NC even has a fan pages and an official history. It was the progenitor of what's now called an "orthodox file manager" (OFM).

So when TUAW wrote about a "dual pane" file manager for OS X I had to investigate. TUAW's writers are too young to recall NC, so they didn't mention it, but indeed ForkLift ($30) is an NC clone for OS X. They even use tabs to switch panes. There's no command line (odd omission really), but the Spotlight integration is well done and substitutes for NC's marvelous NCD command, no tree views, and sadly there's no real equivalent to the NC Alt-F10/NCD functionality (see below). (Now if only Microsoft would remember that search strings need to execute against folders...)

Will I get it? $30 is quite a bit for something like this, I think they should have gone for $20. It feels like a starting point rather than a finished solution -- there are no tree views for example. Still, I'll try it for a week and see ...

Update 6/3/07: Alt-F10. That's what they're missing. That would make this worth $30, its absence makes this worth $10. Sometime in the evolution of NC, perhaps even NC 5, Symantec integrated NCD/Norton Change Directory (esp. see WCD) into Norton Commander. Tap Alt-F10, and the currently active pane was replaced with a tree view of the disk directory structure. Type a few characters and the view switched to the first match. Tap a quick key to move to the next match, always in the context of the tree. Hit Enter to switch the pane to the selected directory.

Brilliant. Nobody has done it better. This was post John Socha I believe; true genius in software requires multiple contributors working around a shared theme and vision.

The Forklift team ought to be able to leverage Spotlight and Cocoa to provide the indices and tree views, so much of the heavy lifting would be done for them.

I doubt they'll do it, but I'll send them a comment.

Incidentally, speaking of parts of the later NC that everyone's forgotten, there's NC Mail/NCMail. Symantec bundled the most efficient email app I've ever used with NC in the waning days of DOS. It was plain, but it was hyper-efficient.

A hex editor for OS X: 0xED

TUAW points to the free 0xED Cocoa Hex editor. The last hex editor I remember using was a DOS tool that was part of either Norton Utilities or a product called something like PCTool. I think Norton Commander might have had one built-in too.

Nice to know there's one for OS X ...

Nothing beside remains: Software long gone

We moved last year, and before the move I dumped boxes of 5.25" floppy (really floppy) disks. I made a quick list of what I tossed, and in memory to old software long forgotten, here it is.

Each of these products represented immense efforts, and all of them were commercially successful. Few are in use now, and even fewer are remembered. As each died thousands of old documents and files became unreadable and worthless.

Volkswriter: My first PC wordprocessor; prior to it I used
Grammatik: standalone DOS grammar checker
PFS First Publisher: ancestor to Apple's Pages
Harvard Graphics: create charts
Q & A: wordprocessing and lightweight database
Smart Software (Integrated: DB, WP, Spreadsheet): powerful and obscure
Sidekick: TSRs were awful. Truly awful.
Enable: Another integrated app. Wordprocessing, database, etc. Only Office survived.
WordPerfect, WP Editor, WP Library, DataPerfect: Remember the WP suite? DataPerfect was pretty bad. The WP Editor was excellent.
Reflex: Innovative database/analytics tool
Copy II PC: Before DRM, there was copy protection. Hence Copy II to break it.
PC File: Original shareware appl.
Quattro Pro: Borland's spreadsheet. Later bundled with WordPerfect.
Laplink: Connect machines before LANs
Grateful Med: PubMed is the inferior replacement
MS DOS 2.11: There grew the dark seeds of Gates' power.
DesqView and QEMM 386: The Horror, the Horror.
MS DOS "Leading Edge": Leading Edge had its moment of glory.
Software Carousel: Switch applications, not multitasking. Actually worked.
GeoWorks Ensemble: Shining moment of hope. Microsoft squashed it like a bug.
PFS First Write: another early wordprocessor
Norton Utilities: many versions, this was once a great product. Hard to believe!
Reams of medical software:
Cyberlog, Discotest, Grateful Med, PDQ, EpiInfo, Medical Letter Drug Interaction
Chessmaster
Sim City: This game is still around.
Falcon F-16
Turbo Pascal, C, C++: Those were Borland's salad days
Fastback: defrag
Spinrite: still in business I think ...
BBeard.arc: A BBS software package, from the modem days.
Procomm Plus: remember modems?
Ready 1.0: original outliner
GrandView: outliner/database
Folio Views: a wonderful product that fell when the web rose.
Norton NDOS (replaced command.com)
Norton Commander version 1, 2, and 3: never equalled. NCMail was my favorite email client for many years.
Magic Cap/General Magic (including letter reaffirming firm commitment from Apple)
Reference Manager: still around I think.

Yes, we do need standard document formats.

Norton Commander -- for OS X?

Macintouch writes:

Xfolders 1.1 is a Mac OS X file manager that displays two directories at once in side-by-side panes and provides Norton Commander-style keyboard operation as well as drag-and-drop and menu commands. Along with move/copy/delete/rename, it provides control of file and folder permissions, bookmarks and a bookmark manager for folders, Finder integration, intelligent path navigation, toolbar access to system utilities, and other features. This release adds an integrated Spotlight search, more versatile search and compare options, support for zip/unzip, faster copying, and other improvements. Xfolders is free for Mac OS X 10.4.

The author's web site has a screen shot that shows the same function keys I remember from the original Norton Commander. NC/DOS was one of the best products I've ever used on any platform -- a true classic. I used FileCommander for OS/2 for a while, it came close. This app is pretty new, so it's worth checking out the versiontracker and macupdate responses. Too bad this German company doesn't have an XP version.

I'll give it a try and update this post with what I learn.

Update 2/24/06: I tried it and it wouldn't launch. I suspect it wants to run in admin mode; I always run in regular user mode. Deleted immediately. If an OS X application won't run in user mode then there's a very high probability that it's junk.

AppRocket: A LaunchBar clone for Windows?

Candy Labs - AppRocket

LaunchBar 3 for OS X was an essentially perfect application. Yeah, I know about QuickSilver. There's even a LaunchBar 4.01 which is supposed to be a nice update -- but why mess with perfection? I paid for LaunchBar and I love it.

I've looked without success for a Windows equivalent. Today I idly typed in an old google search 'launchbar for windows'. It returned AppRocket, now on version 1.2.

On first inspection this is basically a clone of LaunchBar 1.x. Alas, it didn't work for me. On an initial test it didn't seem to be detecting directories or folders (!?!)*. I assumed this was a glitch of the initial (very long) indexing process, but before I could retest AppRocket threw an uncaught exception and crashed. The crashed process continued to consume 40GB of drive space, but I was able to eventually restart XP. (BTW, I thought .NET apps weren't supposed to do that sort of thing any more ...)

It looks like I'll stick with my home-brewed WCD-powered folder-navigator solution for now. I'll try again with 1.3.

---

* One would assume any application designed to support navigation would do at least as well as Norton Change Directory (later integrated into Norton Commander 3.x) -- the perfect application for folder navigation (vintage 1989). Incredibly, application designers consistently ignore the metadata implicit in an enclosing folder. Several 'file location/navigation' utilities for Windows that I've evaluated completely ignore directories! Even some of much celebrated full text search programs don't return matches on folder/directory substrings! (Yahoo Desktop Search, my current somewhat-favorite, does match on directories.)

I do find it fascinating that truly superb ideas in software can be quite successful, then vanish and never be fully implemented again. Compared to what we attempt to do today, NCD was a trivial, utterly simple application. And yet, there's no reliable modern equivalent available on the dominant Windows platform. I think we can only explain this sort of market failure by comparison to the idiosyncratic "choices" of systems ruled by the peculiarities of evolution and natural selection.

5/21/06: I did eventually buy a later, more stable, version of AppRocket. It's ok, but it's definitely not in the same exalted class as LaunchBar. Worth the money though.

Update 6/07: I forget what happened, but I soured on AppRocket. Buggy I believe, and in the end far inferior to LaunchBar. Later, I think, Google bundled similar functionality into their desktop search engine.

Copernic/AOL: current leader in the sponsored (freebie) Windows desktop search race

Copernic Desktop Search - The Search Engine for Your PC

Updated 1/5/05 with, unsurprisingly, some more of the negatives.
Update 5/10/05: I think Yahoo Desktop Search (X1 freebie) is the best PC desktop search tool -- except it doesn't index Eudora. X1 commercial does -- for $80. There was rumor of a Google Desktop Search plugin, but it's not there yet. So, for home, where I use Eudora still on my PC, I'm going to try Copernic 1.5 again.

Introduction

I really like Lookout for searching and managing Outlook. I'm sticking with that one for now. I tried Google desktop search and a few others, including Lookout's desktop search -- didn't like 'em.

Since MSN search uses Microsoft's built-in indexing, which I don't like, I haven't tried it.

I think Yahoo/X1 will be interesting, but it's not a freebie yet.

Copernic/AOL is my latest. It looks good at first glance, but it has some fundamental deficits.

Some key features:

1. You can configure location of the indices. I store them in a folder that I exclude from backup, including backup via ConnectedTLM. You really don't want to backup search indices. All my various search indices tools store files in this folder.
2. You can control readily what folders are indexed. I turned off Outlook search since I use Lookout.
3. It indexes PDF.
4. You can tell it not to index very large files.
5. You can control when it builds the indices, including time of day scheduling. It will do low level background indexing (not a default). Index builds seem very fast and "smart".
6. If you map a network share to a drive letter, it appears that it can index that drive. (Performance may be poor, I haven't pursued this capability as I don't need it at work.)
7. It indexes folder names. (A major flaw in Lookout 1.2's file system search.)

Some fundamental defects:

1. It's "stupid" in how it does search rankings. In particular it doesn't use NTFS file metadata it doesn't weight metadata >> folder name >> file name >> document content and it doesn't differentially weight aspects of documents (titles, early text, etc) .
   (One of the reasons Lookout works so well for email search is that there's so much reich metadata available in Outlook. The typical PC document filestore has very little metadata. I'm very interested in the 2005 OS X Tiger search because of the way it uses metadata.)
   
2. It doesn't return a folder or directory as a search result. The only search results are files. This throws away a lot of the intelligence and metadata that may exist in a file store.
   
3. You can't search within a result set easily.
4. You can't sort result sets by metadata (file size, type, date created, date modified, etc).
5. The Help and Submit Bug buttons are broken. There's no documentation.
   

My configuration

1. Limited search to My Documents folder only. (Removed all other folders, for non-removables set to ignore via "modify" button.)
2. Moved indices to my "Cache" folder (no backup).
3. Update index daily at 1am.
4. Max file size to index 10MB (I may shrink this further)
5. Various other small tweaks to enhance performance.

Conclusion

It's the best of a bad bunch, but I'm not impressed. I'll compare it to X1 when Yahoo launches it. For now I'm staying with Copernic (it beats Google Desktop!) but I still get more value from a directory string search I hacked together that emulates the immensely underappreciated Norton Change Directory feature of Norton Commander and Norton Utilities @ 1989.

Erwin Waterlander, WCD Wherever Change Directory

Erwin Waterlander's WCD - Wherever Change Directory

This is much more impressive than appears on first look. It's a cross-platform text mode program that does what Norton Change Directory did, but with far more control on what's indexed and how. It also allows wild card searches -- which is very, very cool. Combine this with some personal conventions for naming directories and there are great productivity gains. It's too powerful and complex for most WinXP users (it's really more for the UNIX/Linux user), but it's a Source Forge project that could be integrated into many Norton Commander like clones -- or into a Mac OS X AppleScript application! (There's an OX port.)

Erwin's web page doesn't mention how to integrate Windows Explorer with WCD. I was playing with all kinds of trickery, but he gave me the very simple and elegant solution. It's easy to understand what's happending in the Win9x version, but to change the current directory in WinXP one must use a batch file intermediary. Read the Win9x version first to understand the WinXP version. Once the current directory has been changed the command "explorer ." opens the current directory. There are more options for the explorer command I'll probably add, but this is a good starting point. Here's Erwin's advice:

I used this script to run explorer after wcd (on windows NT/2000/XP):

@echo off
wcdwin32.exe %*
echo explorer.exe . >> %HOME%\wcdgo.bat
%HOME%\wcdgo.bat

If you use the dos32bit version on windows 95/98/ME this script will work:

@echo off
wcd.exe %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6
explorer.exe .

Erwin Waterlander
Eindhoven, The Netherlands
www: http://www.xs4all.nl/~waterlan/

Servant Salamander File Manager - Norton Commander Clone #452

Servant Salamander File Manager - Homepage

---

Cute. Commander -> Salamander, Master -> Servant. I'll test this one too.

Any application that spawns as many clones as Norton Commander has, over 15 years since it vanished, was doing something right.

Update: It's missing the critical Norton Change Directory feature, but the developer tells me it's high on their priority list. WinNC.Net is missing it as well. Only Total Commander has it, but their implementation is a bit awkward. Given the size and complexity of modern drives I think to be useful today NCD would need to be constrained to a given directory structure. I believe the WCD utility allows this.

Update 10/12/04: I ended up primarily using WCD to find directories along with some extensions the developer suggested that unified WCD with Windows Explorer. As for Salamander, I discovered there was some kind of Windows extension loaded on startup that lived in my TEMP folder. I don't like that kind of uninvited guest -- even if it is probably fully benign. I uninstalled Salamander.

Total Commander - another Norton Commander derivative

Total Commander - home

---

Now I'm uncovering an array of these clones. And, if I type a few names into Google, I start discovering more of them.

This one is a tiny executable. It's a text mode windows program, so a bit ugly by modern aesthetics. Very fast. It does have the Norton Change Directory feature I need, though again that's not pretty. The desktop integration is a bit odd -- I don't see an obvious quick key to get to the desktop though it is a menu option.

It's not as elegant as the original, but it might work. I'm starting to get a list of the alternatives.

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.