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Double Commander

doublecmd.github.io

154 pointssmartmic156 comments

It's interesting to see the "decline" of secondary file managers on Windows and probably Linux systems, too. Back in the days, pretty much any "power user" had their own favorite replacement for the built-in stop gap solution. Quite often one of the commanders, but I've seen other preferences. There was a pretty huge market of shareware (or open source on linux) for this. Next to image viewers probably one of the most common third party tools.

I rarely see that these days, both from regular users and my fellow software developers. Is it because file usage in general has declined? Generally mabye, but not in that target demographic.

Is it because the system apps have gotten better? Maaaybe. I personally wouldn't consider the Win 11 explorer to be that more usable than winfile.exe, but people have different thresholds.

Personally, I'd even make the argument that they've become worse at times and that they're not even in the same niche, i.e. a "file system interface", probably spatial and a more abstracted powerful file manager could and should co-exist. Hopefully the file selection dialogue then isn't totally unrelated from a UI point of view.

I wonder the same (I've been using 2-panel FMs since late 80s). My guess is that younger devs got more familiar with the command line and some are not even aware they could do file operations even faster and in a more efficient way. Non-devs just rarely use files anymore, everything is being done in a browser or on their mobile devices.

Sure, more powerful/common command line usage is one reason why the default file managers are sufficient. So in a way, Norton Commander lost while NDOS won.

And of course I can't speak for "old" Mac users (I started in the 00s). Back in the Norton/DOpus days, I didn't know that many, so maybe they always were satisfied with the Finder?

Siracusa’s rants about the old Spatial Finder aside, I have really found that the Column view satisfies most of my needs quite easily. Especially if you just open up two windows when you need to move files from one place to another.

Tagging stuff and using saved searches for it is really nice too, Classic had tags but search was a lot slower. It’s really nice to decide which of my illustration commissions I want to work on today by opening a saved search for everything with the “commission” and “in progress” tags, sorted by last modification date, with big icons.

Not sure. I am ok with command line but can not imagine my life without 2 panel FM. TotalCmd on Windows and Double Commander on Linux desktop or Midnight Commander on text mode. In fact Midnight Commander is the first one I install on any fresh Linux.

What meaningful file operations do people do day-to-day? I download stuff to my Desktop or Downloads folder and regularly delete it, but that's only when it's not in a package manager. Beyond that, everything's managed by editors/IDEs/web-apps, and code mostly has established hierarchies that don't change too often. Something has to go horribly wrong for me to ever want to do major surgery on files like a deep copy of a directory, especially in the age of git. The last major copy operation I did was moving my Steam library, which Steam did itself.

Back in the day with Midnight Commander and lynx key bindings, it was a nice way to quickly navigate around a codebase and see what's up, but these days I'd probably do that on GitHub. Even before that, my main use of Norton Commander was editing Windows startup files, and creating a parallel cable connection to my brother's PC to play DOOM. I can't remember the last time I opened my file manager tbh.

Sorry you're not the use case for this. I cut/copy/delete/move files hundreds of times per day, across both local and remote disks. And I use editors, IDEs, and git, too. But the files I cut/copy/delete/move have little or nothing to do with software development.

It would perhaps be useful then if you actually describe your use cases

I still appreciate having a tool like ranger for emacs: https://github.com/ralesi/ranger.el

It's not quite the two-column file manager; but it's inspired by a file manager + preview, with simple keybindings for navigating.

> What meaningful file operations do people do day-to-day?

Copying stuff out of my Downloads folder, for one. I tried doing that with MacOs' Alfred for a while (select in finder -> shortcut -> fuzzy search destination -> move to), but a decent enough bookmark system in a two-panel folder works better for me.

I also often just dump new documents in a standard location and reorganize it later, as that's more user friendly than your average file requester and postpones one of IT and life's hard problems.

All in all, pretty similar to what I did on my 286. There's a little bit more file search involved (at least on my Mac, less so on Linux) and iTunes/cdrip/beets took a lot of effort out of organizing music.

Sure, I don't need a secondary fm for that, but then again, I don't really need a git client/IDE, either.

Among other things I use it for logs: to reach them, to copy them, to find them and to view them. They are just files, not tied to your ide or webapp, and can come from any kind of location.

Keyword search can't replace file navigation. It works like unix way: you must know in advance what to find, but why I would need to find what I already know?

What to use on macOS instead of Finder?

I've been happily using Forklift for years. https://binarynights.com/

By far the best file manager for MacOS is Marta [1]. It is the only app that is close to great old Far Manager, which sadly only works properly on Windows (it does have Linux and MacOS ports, but they are quite far from working smoothly on these platforms).

[1]: https://marta.sh/

This looks really interesting, thanks for sharing. I guess it doesnt require any additional steps in terms of replacing Finder, just install and play?

Yes, pretty much.

Am deeply chagrinned I didn't know about Marta. Thank you!

Seamless archive support FTW.

Also: Marta's config DSL syntax is the closest to The Correct Answer™ I've seen so far. Further confirming author Zhulanow's good taste and technical accumen. https://marta.sh/images/features/config.png

Downloading now. Thanks again.

I’ve never heard of Marta before, but I’m going to try it out. The clean DSL for configuration looks good, and I have to agree that GUI configuration interfaces can be very irksome. (I feel like throwing out my networking gear after using the GUI to set up VLANs—just give me access to the config file that is hidden somewhere.)

Path Finder is my current alternative. It has quirks, but is preferable to Finder.

> Is it because file usage in general has declined? Generally mabye, but not in that target demographic.

Absolutely file usage has declined, even among power users.

My god, two decades ago everything was files -- my MP3 collection, all the photos I'd ever taken, everything I'd ever written. My whole life organization was based around organizing files inside of folders.

Now it's all Spotify, Photos, Docs. Everything is search-based rather than folder-based, thank god. A handful of playlists, starred items, a handful of folders for select projects, and that's it.

And then all of the power user stuff, when it comes to coding or otherwise advanced processing of files with data? It's all command-line now, also thank god -- you can do pretty much anything you want, rather than be limited to the feature set of your secondary file manager. The command line was pretty limited in Windows 3.1 and Windows 95. Now we're thankfully in a different era.

> Everything is search-based rather than folder-based, thank god

Huh. At the very least I use both and couldn't live without both. Especially the really nice, super-subjective folder hierarchies that I built myself and know like the back of my hand...whether local or in the cloud. No clutter, no folders with thousands of different loose files.

I still use vifm as a filemanager a lot, and couldn't do without it. Bulk renaming of files, moving and categorizing downloaded files (documents, books, music, ...). A lot of stuff that I download gets cleaned up periodically unless it's properly categorized and tucked away. What do you use for that? I do use fzf to search, but it's so much easier with vifm. vifm also makes bulk operations on filenames a breeze with vi keybindings

Search is useful, but image search is vastly inferior to proper organization. Whenever I search for an image using Google or Apple, I never find what I'm looking for. I may find something related to the event, but never the actual photo. The photo might as well be lost.

The sole advantage to search, is that no one properly organizes their photos beyond something like date.

I honestly can't imagine how this is true, but of course, experience is a hell of a filter.

I use search for everything (though a lot of the time some folders is all that is needed), and Google Photos is a sin greater than Central Air (#Dogma).

If you tag faces, Google Photos will go out of its way to find decades old photos of the same person and merge that tag for easy search. It will periodically ask me to validate that a half face in the background from 2004 matches the same person in a full portrait from 2018.

I search a loved one, scene or year to go with it and nearly always get what I want back. It gives me Star Trek vibes.

If you tag things you're effectively recreating an organizational hierarchy, just with labels instead of literal folders.

Plain search itself will always lack the feedback you get from the semantics you create by organizing things, unless you attach metadata to your search in some way. Simple example, you look for a math paper in your paper directory, and you find an even better one that you didn't remember. Of course recommender systems in search help with some of this, but search is mostly literal, it doesn't make connections the way you can.

Spotify can give you some popular punk bands that are like the ones you like, but it's unlikely to give you that one record from the local band that nobody else listens to that you manually curated in your playlist 12 years ago.

Image search has a recall problem. This is obvious if you search for a specific photo.

I have a photo of my daughter as a toddler wearing a red vest or coat that reads, “Coca-Cola Security Forces” (She was a child soldier in the Cola Wars. Thank her for her service.) I can not search for that photo. I know the picture was taken at my house, but only vaguely when. If I search for her name and location, I’ll get thousands of photos. If I add some years, I get fewer, but not necessarily the one I’m looking for. Add some content descriptors like “red vest” or “red coat”, it’s totally random. Search for the words on the coat? Lol. That’s not indexed. If I breakdown and scroll through the list of thousands of photos, it’s not there.

Why isn’t it there? I have no idea. Maybe it’s not facially tagged? Maybe it just ranked low in some algo? No clue. No way even to figure it out. I have to resort scrolling through every photo for the date range to find it.

It sucks.

I think because the metaphor went from being file-centric (you choose the file, you launch the app) to app-centric (you open the app, then open the file). It's not exactly applicable to the file manager arena but I guess most users do not need to manage files, they let their apps do it for them.

> There was a pretty huge market of shareware (or open source on linux) for this.

Maybe I'm just _too_ into the linux lifestyle, but as a full time linux user (outside of work where they have me use a macbook), I just use the terminal as my file manager. `ls`, `cp`, `mv`, `rm`, and then a utility installed to have a CLI command for putting things in the trash instead of permanently deleting is pretty much all I need.

>Maybe I'm just _too_ into the linux lifestyle, but as a full time linux user (outside of work where they have me use a macbook), I just use the terminal as my file manager. `ls`, `cp`, `mv`, `rm`, and then a utility installed to have a CLI command for putting things in the trash instead of permanently deleting is pretty much all I need.

I certainly get your point of view. As a long time Unix/Linux user, I find that the standard tools (as you mention) are great, and I use them most of the time.

However, when dealing with large numbers of files/folders and being responsible for their organization/storage, a tool such as MidnightCommander[0][1] can be quite useful.

If that's not your use case and/or other tools work better for you, that's great!

I'd posit that (lack of) prior experience may impact such choices. But IMHO, whatever gets the job done is perfectly fine.

[0] https://github.com/MidnightCommander

[1] https://midnight-commander.org/

> Maybe I'm just _too_ into the linux lifestyle

Linux has plenty of file managers. Just like the system that ran the original norton commander had copy/dir/etc.

Where does a "lifestyle" come in here?

I'd guess that the proportion of linux users who prefer to use the terminal for file management over a GUI is way higher than MacOS or Windows ones. It's not a property of the system itself, but more that someone who prefers to do things this way would be more likely to use linux than the average user. Hence...lifestyle

I totally get your point of view. Had the same, did the same.

If one day you want to try a graphical file manager, I suggest Dolphin. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32336338 :).

I do have nautilus installed, and I use it for exactly one directory: my images stored in Dropbox. Occasionally I'll be looking for a certain photo or screenshot or something and I won't remember the exact name, so it's easier to scan the images visually from preview icons rather than try to figure it out from the entire list of names.

I used to use feh for this kind of things.

I switched from Mac OS X to Linux (Debian) a bit more than 15 years ago. At this time on Mac OS X I was barely using the Finder at all, I spent all my time in the Terminal and managed my files from there.

Once on Linux, I didn't even bother to install a file manager at all, I just kept using the terminal. My environment consisted in Openbox as a window manager, rxvt-unicode as a terminal with Bash as a shell, and then mostly Emacs and Firefox (considering only graphical programs).

A few years ago, maybe 2 or 3 I'm not sure, I decided to try to experience Linux the way "muggles" do, because I was always telling people to use it but I actually never properly used what they would if they followed my advice, i.e., Gnome or KDE. So I read a bit, compared the two, and decided to give a try to KDE.

It was a bit of a pain at the beginning, so my first move was to configure everything so that my usual key bindings worked again, but I quickly found that I could be as efficient and at ease as I was before using KDE Apps as they were intended to be used (I even switched from doing my emails in Emacs to using a graphical email client!).

Switching from managing files in the terminal to using Dolphin has been an amazing experience. Dolphin is probably one of my favorite piece of software today. And for things that are better done using a shell, you have a terminal at your fingertips anytime anywhere with all your settings from Konsole (the actual terminal app) thanks to the fantastic KParts framework. It even works transparently with remote mount over ftps thanks to KIO. Truly this is amazing.

It made me love a file manager, which is not something that I would have thought possible a few years back, or the years before that.

Nowadays I'm slowly switching from Emacs to Kate (this is a bit hard and has lead me to become a small KDE contributor to improve Kate and the underlying KTextEditor ^^).

ftps isn't an interesting widely used protocol, its legacy. You probably meant sftp, a subsystem for SSH which got nothing to do with FTP or FTP over SSL (ftps).

Both Konqueror (later Dolphin) and Nautilus have supported mounting remote SSH for ages. Yeah, its nice. On Windows you can do same with Dokan, and on Linux and macOS CLI with Fuse. I mount a USB stick on Linux with CLI, and I mount a remote SSH with CLI. Tiling window manager and endless terminals. Tho its possible to make KDE tiling, too.

For those who like Sublime Text (command palette) and dual pane file manager I can recommend the cross-platform fman.

Yes thanks, I meant SFTP :).

But my point was mainly that in Dolphin I can open a terminal panel in the directory I'm in, and that this works even for mounted remote directories. Which is frankly quite awesome :).

> It's interesting to see the "decline" of secondary file managers on Windows and probably Linux systems

I would credit that with actually functional OS-level search (Mac OSX 10.5, Win7). Why bother sorting stuff hierarchically when you can dump it all in a /Downloads /Movies /Music folder and let search find it for you?

It probably also coincides with the rise of mobile devices where the paradigm is app-based not file-based.

> It's interesting to see the "decline" of secondary file managers on Windows and probably Linux systems, too. Back in the days, pretty much any "power user" had their own favorite replacement for the built-in stop gap solution.

That's because typical everyday workflows became more on-line and less filesystem-centric this way. The proportion of "power user" is also much smaller today, most of the computer users are ordinary people and don't even have a solid understanding of what a file is.

I started with Norton Commander under MS DOS in 1990-s. I am still using a Far Manager on Windows. It is completely keyboard-based, and I see from the experience that my file operations are 2-3 times more effective then of my peers using system file managers with mouse (or, even worse, touchpad).

I have a years old system of file storage in my home directory, mostly for code: Github, Gitlab, work projects, pet projects etc. Also Downloads folder is there by default. It is much like using a console, but with greater visibility and pre-defined shortcuts for frequent operations.

It seems a bit odd to me to credit Total Commander but not a single one of Midnight Commander, Windows Commander, EF Commander, WinNC, PC Commander, SpeedCommander, XCommander, XTree, YTree, ZTree, or the venerable Norton Commander.

It even still uses the same hotkeys as Norton Commander. Still, it supports Total Commander's plugins in case someone is using those, it's LGPL, it looks like a decent example of a useable Free Pascal application to dive into contributing against, it's cross-platform (Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, macOS), and it builds against gtk2, qt4, or qt5. Overall it looks like a nice project. It could probably use a commit in the About page for a first contribution to the project noting a little more history of its lineage.

Windows Commander was the former name of Total Commander. It changed the name in 2002 after Christian Ghisler received a cease-and-desist letter about trademark usage from Microsoft.

Microsoft has been known to be perhaps overzealous in their trademark protection at times, but I think that's a valid complaint. It fills the same niche as Windows Explorer so confusion was quite possible. I always had Total Commander on my BartPE images back in the day.

This is missing vc - Volkov Commander - written in assembly. It was tiny, had amazingly complete functionality and was blazingly fast.

There were more, eg DOS navigator, Far manager. The latter is still in development.

I loved VC. Its tiny size (less than 100k) made it fit on any floppy disk, even when it was already almost full. It inspired me by showing how powerful our computers are. It was an order of magnitude smaller than NC, if I remember correctly.

Here's some short story about VC: https://web.archive.org/web/20201027035410/http://www.softpa...

I loved Volcov commander. Apart from a tiny size and super-fast speed, I remember it could handle Cyrillic admirably, contrary to Norton Commander.

Yes, sorry. I meant it to be illustrative of many of them being out there and influencing one another. I'm not sure I could put together a definitive list in the scope of an HN comment. vc was definitely worth mentioning, so thanks for bringing it up.

I looked for a Mac binary to download but there is none. You probably have to build it from source.

Or `brew install double-commander` which grabs a dmg from SourceForge.

You'll have to right-click and Open it in the Finder's Applications folder to get past the fact that it's unsigned, but it seems to work an M1 running MacOS 12.4 (Monterey)

I use DC on Mac and TC on Win. One of the problems with Mac DC is that the key reassignment don't use the standard Mac Control, Option, Command keys. They do map to the Win equivalents of Ctrl, Alt, Win keys but not always. And trying to override the Mac's almost hard key assignment of the F1-F12 keys is problematic.

Yeah, but it will install older version. About a year ago they stopped publishing macOS binaries although you can still download nightly macOS builds but they won't cut official releases as they used to.

Developer's explanation: https://doublecmd.h1n.ru/viewtopic.php?p=35121#p35121

Makes sense since Double Commander is literally a Total Commander clone, way more than Total Commander was a Norton Commander(, etc) clone :-P.

Gnome commander is OK for me; where does it fit on the family tree? 'tis easier for me to let my eyeballs do the walking than to figure out and type a regex that is going to find just what I want.

FreeCommander is my go-to for Windows. Though I'm a Mac user at home, I'm stuck on Windows at work and paid for the 64-bit version of FreeCommander. File Manager seems to be some alien thing, and I still work with lots of files at work.

Then there's Far Manager, with is the thing if what you want is the classic blue TUI on Windows:

https://farmanager.com/index.php?l=en

Far also has a lot of plug-ins, it has a community who do these!

It's not odd, they are literally creating an upgraded Total Commander clone.

Commanders! The first thing I install on literally any computer I touch. It's like climbing on the top of the hill (or mountain!) and overlooking the dense foliage. I really don't establish a mental connection with the machine until I have a commander running. Doing any disk operations in the Explorer, whatever else drag-and-drop there is, or just plain shell, is just pathetically painful and slow.

Also, shout out to DOS Navigator! I used Norton Commander until 386DX-40, but then switched to the Navigator. Still remember I saw it first time in a shop where I was buying pirated games. The dude in the shop with the long hair was copying files and it looked uber-cool for some reason. I had to ask what was the name of this wonderful utility. He silently showed me the About dialog without turning back. There was no way back to NC from that point on my high-tower Pentium-133.

I guess stuff like Commander never quite got a hold on me because it feels easy to do everything at the shell. What kinds of benefits am I missing out on?

Seconded. I am feeling the enthusiasm of people on this thread and I am really curious - if this could really make me as happy as it makes them I’m totally game, but I just don’t see where it would fit into my workflow. Can some people give more concrete examples of what they use it for?

I used extensively Midnight commander on a SunOS workstation for quickly browsing source codebases that spanned thousands of files without launching XEmacs. But for me the killer feature was having special popup menus (configurable per directory!) that could launch scripts on top of the selected files was pretty powerful. For example in the pre-subversion days I could check-in a bunch of files that were changed into the repository using a proprietary tool from my employer with just a couple of keystrokes.

I am not a dev. But I've built dependency on following workflow: Navigating to right file -> taking full path to clipboard (Ctrl + Shift + C) -> switching to work app, e.g. CAD (Alt + Tab) -> Open dialog (Ctrl + O) -> Paste full path (Ctrl+V) and hit Enter. That's the main reason for I can't use GNOME and that awful GTK file dialog. I can navigate really quickly in commanders, because I've used them since I've started using computer - so that makes this workflow legit for me.

2 panes (both heavily tabbed so more like 10-15 of them representing various projects/activitives, tabbing for some reason works better mentally than bunch of explorer windows) is great concept, you always move from A to B if organizing/copying/moving. When I see people trying to achieve something in explorer, its literally 10x slower, and I speak of people doing it for living in bank, like desktop support guys.

Alt+F7 -> fulltext search, only in given file types, in archives (recursively), limiting for size, date, regexp etc. - way more powerful than any other tool I've ever used.

Viewing and editing files directly in archives (or in archives in archives in archives) without manually unpacking - as mainly java dev I do this very often. Again the speed and convenience is unmatched.

Very good built-in multi-rename tool, with preview of changes, GUI for this is so much better than any command line tool.

Very good file comparison tool - cleaner than anything other products (or dedicated ones) bring.

I don't want to end up listing all features of Total commander, but suffice to say its too my first tool to install (after firefox with ublock origin). Its not as much about how content I am using it, but whenever I see colleagues doing similar actions, they are maddeningly slow, ineffective and sometimes even give up for task that takes me few seconds. But that's full time usage of 2-pane mode since 1993, never saw any appeal in those simple explorer-like windows when I can be super quick with few shortcuts.

Thanks for taking the time to type this out, definitely motivates me to give it a look!

I grew up with MS-DOS. After Dosshell i started using Norton Commander. Nowadays i use Total Commander of Double Commander. For me personally the main benefit of commanders is having data in point A and point B simultaneously in a single gui and then do stuff like copying, moving, etc between those points.

Other benefits are i like fast file editing, quickly exploring an archive or zip file and scheduled copy/move tasks.

You only really benefit when you use it a while and know all the key bindings by heart. Most of these seem pretty minor but when you get used to them you totally miss them when you don't have Total Commander available. And it's hard to explain to people, similar to explaining why one uses Dvorak layout or a Tiling WM to someone who has never thought about using those. Some examples:

- selecting files to work with. add, remove to your selection by pattern or manually (e.g. all *.jpg files except the two largest) and work on those

- move files to subdirectories without first creating a subdirectory (it creates it on-the-fly)

- multi-rename tool. select some files, rename them (with auto-incrementing counters, regex, taking substrings of the original name, etc). This is the killer feature for me (e.g. rename files with timestamps like dd-mm-yy-something.jpg to yyyy-mm-dd (SOMETHING).jpg or things like that. Oh and you can use fields from metadata too (id3, exif, ...)

- very fast integrated text/hex viewer with selectable codepages, ansi/ascii switch, and support for images and other multimedia files

- incremental search in file lists

- directory sync. compare and sync different directories by copying files one way or both ways

- everything done via keyboard, no need to move the hands to the mouse and back for anything

- integrated command line, so you can still type something like "cd \\server.domain.local\share$" and instantly have that directory in the tab (you cannot "cd" to an UNC path in cmd.exe)

- opening and working with tar, zip, rar files as if they were regular files. and with plugins you can even open disk images as if they were files

- another nice feature I totally like but which is hard to explain: you copy files simply by pressing f5 and enter. but when you press f5 a second/third time before pressing enter, the textbox selection (for the destination filename/path) switches through the full path, the filename+extension and the filename. So you can easily copy a file and change (overwrite) the filename in the destination just by pressing f5, f5, newnamehere, enter. It keeps the extension and the path you have open in the second window. True, you can do this with tab completion on the command line quite easily too, but you still have to press tab multiple times (depending on the uniqueness of the path maybe a lot more often), and you still have to type the extension by hand

- did I mention plugins? viewer-plugins (I have one that interprets ANSI sequences, for example, for vieweing those cool 90s stype BBS ads), packer plugins (I wrote a lot of these to unpack/access data files from old games), etc.

- for retro enthusiasts: PORT connection (through a parallel LapLink cable or USB data transfer cable) to another PC running Total Commander. No network necessary.

- full text search (ascii, hex, unicode) through all files (or only selected files/directories), including in archive files, with multiple patterns and excludes: alt-f7, ".c;.h|~.",alt-t, "printf" -> search for "printf" in all .c and .h files except those that start with a tilde. After the search you can send the result list to the left/right panel and work with it as if it were a regular directory. i.e. select all files that match "data." and copy them to a different directory (even though the source files are scattered throughout an entire directory tree). Of course you can also seach by metadata (only files/directories/readonly files, timestamps, limited directory depth, file size larger/smaller than X, and with the right plugins by metadata like id3/exif too ...)

Yes, for all these things there are either separate tools that do the same (maybe even better): multi-rename tools exist, opening matroshka-archives (zip in zip in tar in gz) can be done with 7zip, and there are plenty of image viewers out there that offer more features than the integrated viewer. RSync can do synchronization a bit better. but here you have it all in one place

Well said and that about covers it for me. Once you learn the commands, there is very little thinking needed to traverse the file structure, picking/moving/modifying files, synching and comparing, all at blazing speed. It is the first app I add to any OS I'm working with.

I am sure your question is serious, but it sounds a little bit like "What can I do with a spreadsheet that I cannot do in code?"...

DOS Navigator was the definitive dual pane file manager for MSDOS, no doubt!

DirOpus for Amiga was my first two-panel filemanager.

Screenshot for nostalgia :) -> http://www.abime.net/img/files/applications/DOpus/DOpus4_2.p...

Alas, error 403.

Hotlink protection. Hit Return on the URL bar to reload it with a clean referrer, and it will display.

I really found it surprising that so few of the PC based orthodox filemanagers adopted the DOpus style of user-defined buttons and multiple rows thereof at the bottom, instead keeping with the few function key-based operations inherited from a time when there was simple no other option.

(I'm aware of Gentoo and Worker doing that on Linux)

While it is nostalgia, I use Directory Opus 12 every day on my windows PC.

Really speeds up my everyday work in game development.

Directory Opus addict here too. It is my MVP in pretty much everything I do on my PC.

I'm a big fan of two-panel file managers, starting with the ancestor of them all, Norton Commander under DOS. Under Windows, I used Total Commander. I even started developing an NC clone myself with Delphi, but only got as far as an "alpha version". After switching to Linux, I used Krusader for a few years, but then discovered and switched to Double Commander. Since it is developed with Lazarus/FreePascal, maybe I will be able to apply some of the ideas I had for my Delphi NC clone to it (if I can find the time and sympathy from the maintainers)?

> Under Windows, I used Total Commander.

I would recommend Far for Windows users. Much more like the original Norton Commander.

https://www.farmanager.com/

Yeah, Far actually has pretty good integration with the command line, which is a must for a good file manager - and a file manager is a very natural fit for many CLI workflows.

This is really "in addition to total commander" as far as I'm concerned. Far is great on the CLI, but when you're not working with terminals you generally want a normal looking application. Both Far and TC are basically "two sides of the same coin", you can use either one, but using both in their respective environments makes life even better.

> Far is great on the CLI, but when you're _not_ working in the CLI you want a normal looking application.

I have Far as an icon on my desktop/shortcuts bar. I just click it and it runs. When I quit it (F10), the window goes away. Most people will not even realize it's a CLI program. What exactly would be the problem using it this way?

I never said there was a problem, I said that having _both_ vastly increases usability. If you're the kind of person who looks at a DOS era UI and goes "this is fine, what's the problem?" then there isn't one for you.

But if you're the kind of person who wants to see terminal graphics when they're doing terminal work, and a normal user interface that follows the OS conventions that every other user interface uses as well when you're doing "normal" work, then having both installed so you can run each in the context they make sense in vastly improves your computerin' life.

(And if you're the kind of person who rarely has to use the terminal (or only ever use the terminal inside a code editor, IDE, or other application that follows OS UI conventions) or literally never uses a terminal, then something that looks like a 1980's DOS application is almost certainly going to be a hard nope)

Why would you want it to be like Norton Commander while Total Commander is far superior?

I haven't used Total Commander, but I know Far is extremely capable. Do you know what Total Commander does that Far doesn't?

I personally picked Far as I was very used to the layout and keybindings of Norton Commander. I like to do everything with the keyboard, and didn't need to learn new keys.

Also, Far is free.

I've really liked Altap Salamnder for Windows. Lots of features, and freeware too. https://www.altap.cz/

I used it for quite some time, even bought a license but then dropped it when when they dragged their feet for years with utf8 filename support. I think they never fixed it.

I've using it since version 1.52 AFAIK and this is FIRST app i install on fresh Windows.

I also recommend Everything. It's the best file searching app I've found for Windows that fits my searching style, just type a regex and give me what I want.

https://www.voidtools.com/

Someone liked it https://developer.run/31 - and expresses preference over Dolphin, which I don't understand because I find that Dolphin does all that but with the benefits of KDE integration.

Neat to see this here, I just started using this app a couple months ago and I like it.

I've been a big fan of alternative file managers for years. I loved LIST back in the DOS days as an alternative to DIR =) where you could easily browse folders, and view files in regular or hex view with a keypress.

After moving to Windows, I wanted something similar and found The V File Viewer (used to be called V, The File Viewer) by Charles Prineas (https://www.fileviewer.com). This has hex view, CSV view, and many other useful features. It can be set up in a dual-paned fashion similar to the *-Commander line of apps, but with its own approach. I used Total Commander for a while too and registered it, but didn't stick with it.

Recently I wanted something similar that I could put on computers at work and share with staff, and found Double Commander and like it a lot. It has its own approach and quirks as well, but I'm getting used to it.

I also like that fact that it's written in Free Pascal and Lazarus. I used to do a lot with Delphi and this has gotten me back into that language with the thought that I might be able to contribute some changes at some point.

Also along those lines, just the other day I learned about CudaText which is a very nice open source programmer's editor similar to SublimeText. It's also written in Free Pascal and Lazarus. I'm happier using this and sharing with staff than I am with Visual Studio Code which comes with too much overbearing MS-ness for my preferences.

Double Commander is great and in my opinion better then then Total Commander - it has better UI, saner configuration and is cross platform and FOSS. DC is first thing I install on any Windows machine instead of using Explorer.

If you want quick way to install it and/or TC on Windows, along with selection of plugins, use my chocolatey TCP [1] packages.

You can use

     cinst doublecmd tcp
     cinst totalcommander tcp

to install doublecmd or totalcommander with around 20 great plugins and keep them all up to date with single command (choco update), or you can cherry pick individual plugins. Since both file managers use the same plugin format, the package will work with whatever one you use.

Both packages have parameter /DefaultFM which will make system open it everywhere where it would open Explorer instead.

There are also dark and minimial themes I created you may want to check: tcp-unlit and dcp-unlit [2]

Everything is on GitHub in case you want to improve [3]

[1]: https://community.chocolatey.org/packages/tcp#dependencies

[2]: https://community.chocolatey.org/packages/dcc-unlit

[3]: https://github.com/majkinetor/au-packages/tree/master/tcp

FAR works on Linux and MacOS as well https://github.com/elfmz/far2l

All of these commanders are a rip of the original Norton Commander by John Socha in 1986. John also created the first screen saver and coined the term. His company also created the Microsoft Plus! addon for Windows 95 and screensavers for Win98.

Pretty cool dude!

Reminds me of https://wetmachine.com/my-thoughts-exactly/ghost-writer/

>I was ego surfing today when I came upon this link to a book “Inside the Sun386i and Sun486i” by Peter Norton and, to my great astonishment, me.

>And it turned out that I was going to have to write a 400 or so page book. For which I was going to be given, I think, a $3,000 advance against royalties. The book was going to say “By PETER NORTON” and there would be a tiny “with John Sundman” at the bottom. Norton was not required to do any writing or editing;

I guess you were joking, but FWIW, John Socha is the creator of Norton Commander:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Socha

> John Socha-Leialoha (born 1958) is a software developer best known for creating Norton Commander, the first orthodox file manager

As a regular Total Commander user since version 3-point-something (and Norton Commander before that), I cannot imagine ever going back to Windows Explorer for file management. I'm infinitely faster than coworkers who work with Explorer, and it's awesome.

Seeing an almost-perfect clone as fully open-source software makes me happy. However, building a fully-featured open-source clone is probably years in the future, even for the features I use most. One just has to read the release notes for Total Commander to see what kind of corner-cases and special cases Christian (Total Commander author) has had to take care of. Just being able to put copy jobs into the background, work some more, and then bring them back into foreground again I cannot even imagine on how tricky this was to code so that it works correctly (and all using Pascal, no less)

I will definitely keep an eye out on this one, but I don't think I'll make the switch in the near future.

Thank you. As a total commander user, I was hoping someone would do this comparison and share it. Appreciated!

DC is very complite replacement of TC, I was using TC (in advanced way, I know most of its numerious features) for decades and switched to DC without missing anything.

For data hoarding a good file manager is still key. When you're managing your own data without todays abstraction layers provided by all those walled gardens (Google Photos, Spotify, Netflix), you will copy, rename and structure a lot of that data: Downloaded content often times packed away in countless partial rar files, sometimes wrongly named or structured.

Long story short, I still depend on:

- Advanced regex bulk renaming of totalcommander (but less so since Windows 11 + PowerToy's Renaming)

- Fast two panel navigation, for all that pirated content (Audio/Software piracy is legal under certain circumstances in Switzerland, for example for sharing within the family)

- Fast two panel folder diffing for my Photography/Videography backup into Google Drive using Google Filestream as a virtual drive (but less so, since using WinDiff for folder and file merging)

Started using it a couple of years ago when I was mostly using a single operating system, now it saves my sanity by providing the same good file browsing experience across all systems.

I use emelfm2 on Linux. But really this all made me nostalgic for XTree [0]. What made it so damn good? Why don't we have a modern equivalent these days?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XTree

There is a fantastic windows clone of XTree that has been around forever... still updated

https://www.ztree.com/html/ztreewin.htm

How I wish there was a native version of ZTree for Linux.

I used to be a big user of Total Commander back in the Win9x days (then Windows Commander)

I was actually too much used to it and I had a hard time using my friends computer at all using the default Windows explorer.

I probably updated to WinXP at some point and didn't reinstall it. Never felt the need to to install a double windows file manager since then. Even if it's clearly better than the default option.

Just two years ago I had a developer I worked with on a regular basis, he is a Total Commander power user. He never opens Explorer or navigates the file system outside Total Commander.

There is still a ton of weird Windows utilities being developed and maintained. While I personally don't like the platforms, there is a lot of safety in knowing that you can learn a tool and then almost 30 years later, it's still available.

I'm still confident that if you want to future-proof your application, C++ and Windows is the platform to go for. Even if I don't like it.

Windows explorer is almost unusable. Microsoft poluting it with Downloads, Images, Videos and My Documents virtual folders (just to name a few) didn't help either.

What specific aspects do you find to be almost unusable?

There's room for improvement (new features are always nice), sure, but 'almost unusable' is quite the exaggeration when you consider that there is ~1B Windows installs and yet outside of small tech circles I've never once heard someone complain about Explorer or its usability.

It Just Works, pretty much all the time, and is easy enough and intuitive enough that I haven't even had to explain it to the tech-illiterates in my circle.

Does the Downloads folder really make you say 'this is unusable'?

I often "favorite" such threads because of the alternatives listed in the comments. I use Multi Commander[0]. I have tried a few of the others over the years but for the last five years or more I haven't moved from Multi Commander.

[0] http://multicommander.com/

To be fair, the majority of my "file manager" work is in my IDE, or other applications.

If there's any other file motion, odds are it'll be the command line for me.

I'm not pedantic about it, it's just how it is.

My current gross abuse at this level is with the Mac Page/Numbers/Keynote/TextEdit applications that work with Apple document model.

I know I should, I but I just don't close anything. For quick letters in Pages, I just reuse the same template over and over and print it out. It's not untoward for me to have 30+ "Untitled XXX" documents open. Just one of the many zillion windows I routinely have open. I have 50 documents open in Preview. So, my "file manager" is the Windows menu.

The pervasive persistence of the Apple Document model is very abuse friendly.

IDEs have notoriously bad file managers. I havily use VSCode CTRL P but that is when I know exactly what I want. If not, I need visuals and nothing beats good file manager.

I've been playing with this on Linux. Lots of features. Built-in everything: editor, viewer, searcher, batch-renamer, grepper, etc. It all seems to work. No crashes. FreePascal is fantastic for writing things like this.

If I were stuck on Windows without Cygwin (coreutils), this would do.

>I've been playing with this on Linux.

Short question: does it grab Tab keystroke or allow to use it in shell normally?

Lack of shell Tab expansion was the second reason I never accepted MC in Linux even though I was a fan of NC. The first was the lack of F1-F10 keys in the sub keypad on the left side of the classic IBM PC keyboard in all keyboards available to me except the one I bought in '92...

It opens a separate xterm window on debian. Does it have an integrated terminal on windows?

I'm no longer on Windows, but I always loved [Total Commander](https://www.ghisler.com/).

As others have noted before: there is a decline in the need for this kind of tools because files are hidden from view nowadays. We finally have systems where most of the time, a photo is "a photo" and not "a file that you open with [Irfanview](https://www.irfanview.com/)(or whatever)".

In my opinion Total Commander is the #1 best app ever and Double Commander is an excellent free clone. It used to be incomplete and buggy but improved substantially during the recent years.

These old school Commander type file managers don’t integrate too well. Windows 11 side by side pane is fantastic anyway.

I guess it’s ideal if you really have to sit down and do busy work, but I don’t see anything wrong with File Explorer……..except that obnoxiously excessive side panel that forever thinks I want to use OneAnything or weird quick access virtual folders that points to something called Documents completely separate from my local Documents sigh. They could make file explorer a lot simpler.

Abstract:

Marta is the greatest file manager for MacOS, by light years.

Longer version:

Before switching away from Windows, I was a long-time Far Manager [1] user. It is a great, great program far better than various graphical commanders. It had a set of killer features:

1. Quick directories, press ctrl-1 and you are there

2. No graphical cruft. All these tiny boxes and panels with buttons you see everywhere on the likes of Total commander, Double commander, etc, they are gone, none

3. It is text mode. Hard to spoil a properly done text mode with bad fonts, tiny fonts, etc - especially if you can set them up yourself

4. Folder operations. Open same folder in another panel, compare panels, selecting files, masks, regex, all done, all great

5. Great archive support. Open archive from folder, copy from archive, all done all great

6. Very, very capable build-in editor with code highlighting, and hex viewer/editor(!). I could edit savegames right from a file manager, imagine that?!

I could go on, but nothing I have ever tried on GNU/Linux and MacOS came even close to it. I even tried to use ports of Far [2], but it is... well, far from smoothly supporting either platform.

So I was really unhappy when using MacOS (there are few apps I hate as much as native Finder) until I've found Marta [3] recently. And Marta is truly great file manager for MacOS that even improves on Far in a lot of ways. Its author Yan Zhulanow is an extremely great developer who has put a lot of thought into the application, and it does everything that Far does (maybe sans a built-in editor), and it improves on it in many ways. Try it out.

It is blazing fast, it is very well thought through from top to bottom, and it is probably one of the few perfect apps that leave you stunned after discovering it. It does have a relatively high learning curve to learn how to configure it and to learn all the hotkeys, but the result is very much worth it.

[1]: https://www.farmanager.com/

[2]: https://github.com/elfmz/far2l

[3]: https://marta.sh

You don't have to use GUI with both TC and DC. Its a matter of configuration.

One important thing I do is set fuzzy filter on so that when I type in folder it selects file/folder I want quickly and ENTER will do the rest. Hotkeys are a thing too. I never use mouse with them.

It does feel like a native Mac app and is quick and responsive. Is there a way to modify the key hotkeys to be like Total Commander? At this point I don't want to have to learn another set of keystrokes. I briefly looked at it and hit space to select a few files, and it opened them, and then I hit Cmd+D to get a quick directory and instead duplicated the file. So it seems that a key mapping from us old commander users must have been done by someone.

I think you can, it has a pretty powerful configuration editor. I wasn't specifically looking in TC-like config, because Far hotkeys are hard-wired in my brain and I felt that they are mostly the same in Marta.

Love it. It's the first thing I install on macOS and Linux; for Windows I already own several Total Commander licenses.

What do you use on macOS?

I'm still using it from when I last installed it on my macOS, didn't realize he deprecated mac support :( . FWIW, the installer is called "doublecmd-0.9.10-9640.qt.x86_64.dmg" if you want to look it up online somewhere.

I'll guess I have to look for an alternative now... sigh

https://doublecmd.sourceforge.io/site/eng/snapshots.php snapshots for mac available, latest is 1.1.0

Thanks, worked for me!

36 years later, and people are still cloning Norton Commander?

I never understood the appeal of them, especially given a GUI. (Recall, NC was originally a DOS app.) I suspect OFMs are a class of software that's going to die out when the generation of users that grew up with them die off.

Somewhat unrelated, but I'm still wondering why there still appears to be not much of a push for strong GUI filemanager + terminal integration. I know Dolphin has it, but it feels not quite there.

Double Commander,

inspired by Midnight Commander, (1994)

inspired by Total Commander, (1993)

inspired by Norton Commander, (1986)

inspired by ...

Double Commander is amazing! Is is a drop in replacement for Total Commander. It even supports Total Commander expansion modules, of which there are hundreds.

Just let me replace win+e without ahk or registry editing.

Total commander is linkes to Win+1 for me, no need for Win+E! Win+2 is for Notepad++

Those two are my most used shortcuts on Windows.

Must give double commander a test run on Linux (and see if that’s better than TotalCommander in Wine).

TCM shortcuts are so second nature that I can’t imagine anything else (never found a good solution did OSX)

I am too old to call it by it’s new name MacOS, I also call the command key for the Apple key ;-)

To expand on what tveyben mentioned, the first 10 items in your Windows task bar can be opened by pressing Win+1 through Win+0. If you pin items there, they will always have that keyboard shortcut.

Even so, as much as I prefer using alternate file managers, I still like having Win+E for regular old Explorer.

I've been a big fan of xPlorer 2 [1] for many years now.

[1] https://www.zabkat.com/

Literally one of the first software I've ever used since the first 2000s. Still used to date. Love me some Total Commander!

If I don't have TC shortcuts in my muscle memory, am I losing out on using Krusader on linux rather than Double Commander?

Double Commander and Total Commander are amazing tools of the mind.

Nope, depending on your workflow, you can miss features of Krusader like archive integration, browsing over ssh, lock-step navigation in panels, selection modes, builtin editor/viewer formats coverage and other tiny yet comfortable goodies.

Double Commander is an acceptable substitute of Krusader on non-Unices.

MC meets MS Word, no thanks, MC already has everything + fluffy feeling you are on 80386. Sometimes I just go there to relax

Would be interesting to know what these "new ideas in file management" are that TC does not have.

Too bad it's not TUI, I was hoping to see an improved version of midnight commander :)

Total Commander is the best commander.

There's a great 3rd party upgrade to it. Best for power users:

https://www.tcup.pl/index.php/en/

To continue with the 1990's vibe, Mr T would "pity the fool who don't use TCUP"

Having a hard time finding anything on the site that explains how it's different from Total Commander though, other than price. If it's just "Total Commander, but free", including TC plugin support, I'd be rather surprised if that's even legal? Because if it looks and acts effectively the same as a paid application, except yours is free, then there is very concrete and intentional monetary damage being done.

You must really love software patents!

No it's not about patents and legalese. It's about human(e) attitude.

Christian Ghisler has been developing Total Commander for 27 years, since 1995. While he didn't invent the idea of two-pane file manager and more or less reimplemented Norton Commander in proper graphics-mode GUI, he added so much more to it over those three decades that it wouldn't be right to call it a copy of NC; moreover, he didn't ship it for free, he priced it at the same $49.

What the author of Copy, sorry, Double Commander does is pure and simple dumping. It's like standing next to a bakery and giving away same cakes for free. Does that feel right?

I wonder how the development of Double Commander is backed financially.

It is open source, free as in libre, EDIT and as in beer.

From https://doublecmd.github.io

>Double Commander is absolutely free <,comma> open source software.

Implies free as in beer as well, unless someone rubs my nose into the price stated somewhere on the website.

Do you have the same attitude towards, say, FreeCiv?

Not into games, but have the same sentiment towards Microsoft (with VSCode) and other companies and communities which give away software that all but clones commercial analogs while drawing profits off something else, effectively squeezing those who sell software for a living out of business.

I hate them with a passion: do not mistake a question based on how the world seems to work for being happy with how the world works. If I use this, and it gets litigated out of existence, I'm right back to "okay so NOW what do I use?".

Competition is not "monetary damages." There are oodles of orthodox file managers[1], and several of them are named "Commander" so it's not like there is a trademark case here. Compatibility with competitors software is also quite well established as being legal.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_manager#Orthodox_file_man...

So that's already a fundamental misunderstanding of how the law works, whether we like it or not (and make no mistake: I don't), competition involves making your own thing with its own look and feel, that fills the same market need. This is not that: this is a clone of the Total command look and feel, in addition to its functionality. So as someone who pays for some software, and doesn't pay for other software because it's free: how is this, from a US and EU legal perspective, legal rather than preventing a company from earning revenue by offering a near-identical clone for free?

If you sell your own brand of cornflakes, with a distinct box, even if you contract the exact same third party cornflake producing plant (i.e. exactly what happens in the laundry detergent industry), that's competition. If you make your cornflakes available for free, and you use basically the same packaging as Kellogg's to the point where if you showed both to someone unfamiliar with the exact styling queues they'd go "... aren't these the same?" that's laws being broken.

And from the screenshots, this sure does look identical to Total Commander. So again: is this actually legal? (it might be, I don't know, which is why I asked)

Of course it is legal. If you have some know-how that you want to protect, that's what patents are for. If you have some unique recognizable design that you want to protect, that's design patents and trademarks.

But the two-panel file management paradigm predates Total Commander by many years - TC itself copied NC - so I doubt they would be able to patent anything worthwhile even if they tried.

Okay there are a few things going on here:

1. A substantially similar product

I think we both agree this is legal (given your laundry detergent example)

2. Confusion for the original product in marketing materials (including packaging)

- This relates primarily to trademarks law; I partially addressed this in my original comment pointing out that simply the name being of the form "X Commander" isn't likely an enforceable trademark.

- The DC homepage has a screenshot, then some text, which includes the text "it is inspired by Total Commander." This seems analogous to a picture of cornflakes followed by "compare to Kellogg's Cornflakes"

3. The UI looking an awful lot like TC

If the icons TC used were copyrighted, and DC used them, that's clear copyright infringement, but I don't think this is being alleged here.

This gets complicated quickly; the general layout (status bar at top, clickable reminders of keyboard shortcuts at bottom, two side-by-side panes, &c) did not originate with TC, so if DC is in trouble for this, it's not with TC

The great similarity in the general look is at least partly to them both using Lazarus, and partly intentional to make it easier to use by existing TC users.

The similarities just from using the same toolkit are generally fine. I think the point you are raising that when combined with the intentional layout similarities this could rise to the level of product confusion; if the buttons all looked very different, but were in the same screen positions and did the exact same things, then DC would look very different from TC.

As far as copying the "look and feel" Lotus v. Borland strongly suggests that the interface of an application is not subject to copyright. If TC had a design patent or trademark on the menu or toolbar look, then they could almost certainly enforce this, but it would have had to have been registered in advance.

this is a good starting point if you want to explore that particular rabbithole: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Look_and_feel#Lawsuits

It runs on Linux natively, for one. And also the settings are reorganized.

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