Whatever Happened To Norton Commander?: captain18

When I finally made the jump from my Commodore 128 to the IBM PC in 1993, it was through the friend of a friend who had run a BBS for several years, first on the C=64 and then on a 386. Through them, I acquired things like DOS 6.22, WFWG, QEMM, and Norton Utilities (back when they were truly powerful). But the single most important program John and Bruce hooked me up with was a little something called Norton Commander.

Norton Commander 5

The Norton Commander (NC) is the father of what has come to be known as the Orthodox File Manager (OFM). It consisted of two window panes, essentially source and destination, and direct command-line access. It handled your basic copy/move/delete functions, of course, but also incorporated tree searches for filenames and files containing text, directory comparison, and text file viewing and editing. All from within the program. NC was initially written by John Socha (he later developed Microsoft PLUS!) in 1984 and was released by Peter Norton Computing in 1986. Keep in mind, when this was first written, it was for PC-DOS 3.x -- it's easy to underestimate how powerful this program was when it entered the market.

Much like WordPerfect 4.x/5.x, NC's strength was equal parts solid programming and smart use of hotkeys. File selection could be done with INSERT, or pattern-matched with +. View with F3, Edit with F4, Copy with F5, Move with F6, Delete with F8 -- and you could move directories or even whole trees as easily as one file. The old "deltree c:\windows /y" joke could be done as quickly as INSERT, F8, ENTER, A. As the program matured, it could even dive into ZIP archives to view trees and files.

Norton Commander For Windows 1.0

Three factors conspired to push NC into a corner. One was the sale of Peter Norton Computing to Symantec in 1990 and Socha leaving the company. Two was the release of Windows 95 along with the FAT32 filesystem and long file names. Three was the fact that compared to File Manager, Windows Explorer didn't completely suck. Although Symantec had continued nominal development of NC through Version 5 in 1994, they weren't interested in converting it to Win32 -- until the Eastern European community demanded it.

In 1997, Norton Commander for Windows was released with support for long filenames and NTFS but little other innovation. In fact, the program no longer included its own built-in viewer, instead including a lite version of QuickView which made it less useful and unable to view things like HTML right out of the box. The program wasn't even widely available in the US. Hell, the only reason I found out about NCWin was because a friend worked at Symantec at the time. After Version 2.0 was released in 1999 development was again halted and the program discontinued. A recent Google search found one vendor with a few overpriced copies still in stock. Unfortunately, my 3.5" install disks are now damaged such that it no longer works quite right under Windows 2000...

Total Commander

One of the reasons NCWin foundered was due to the proliferation of work-alike clones that had been surfacing as early as 1992. By the time Symantec re-entered the market, other up-and-coming OFMs were often cheaper, more extensible, and developed more rapidly than the Real Thing. I've looked on and off for years now for one I've liked, and while there have been around 100 clones made, I hadn't found one that had the right feel.

Well, that's not entirely true. I did discover Midnight Commander for Linux, a project begun in 1994, but it doesn't have a quality Win32 port. I would download a clone and use it for a few days, then inevitably find something that it couldn't do well (or at all) and I would go back to my broken NCWin install. At the start of the year I decided to make another attempt and went through about six different implementations. I found WinNC Network Edition tolerable but too heavy on bells, whistles, and eye candy.

Finally though, I found Total Commander (formerly Windows Commander). It's very configurable and supports key remapping and extensive customization, so the couple of keystrokes it didn't replicate I was able to put in myself, and I was able to give it the old NC look-and-feel. It's reasonably priced at ₣40 and includes many Midnight Commander innovations such as treating FTP sites as virtual directories and connecting with other computers using Laplink-style cables. It's also unrestricted shareware (nagware, actually) and has a legacy 16-bit version available for classic computing.

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