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Comment by cestith | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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!

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.

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.

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

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

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