35 years of file managers

Norton Commander

When I got my first PC at age 6, I cried. It was 1991, and I’d really wanted a Commodore 64, because I knew it had a lot of games. And instead, I got this crappy PC, with an Intel 286 CPU, 40 MB of HDD, and a monochrome screen.

I had three pieces of software on this PC:

This Tetris game
QuickBASIC (Type PRINT "Well Hello world!" under “Untitled” and press F5!)
Norton Commander (2.0 or so)

Did you count? That’s 1 game. I felt really disappointed.

Got really bored with Tetris after a week. Norton Commander was a lot more interesting! Creating files with funny 8+3 char names like “DUCKCOCK.EXE”, deleting my OS and then not being able to boot the computer, creating dirs, looking into binary files — now these were a lot more interesting!

Then eventually I got bored with that too, and started playing with QuickBASIC, which led me to where I am today. But I’ll never forget Norton Commander which, I feel, was kinda one of the places where I grew up.

Total Commander

(Note: If you’re also coming from Total Commander, I wrote about how Cmdr compares.)

After spending years in Windows 3.1, Windows 95 appeared, and with it, file names that could be more than 8+3 chars, and soon enough, seeing all the PROGRA~1 dirs made Norton Commander (NC) less fun. That was the time when Windows Commander (WC) got huge. It looked pretty much like what Total Commander (TC) looks like today.

It was weird at first, and I remember using NC in parallel for quite some time, but eventually I fully converted to WC. So much so that around 1997, I hand-made a 256-color icon set for it because it only had 16-color icons at the time. Christian Ghisler included it in the app and sent me a license to WC, which I hold to this day! ❤️

In 2002, Microsoft expressed concerns about the name, so the author renamed it to Total Commander.

Commander One

For two decades, Total Commander was the #1 software I installed on a new computer. But then, in 2021, I switched to macOS. On macOS, my main gripe was missing TC. I tried Total Commander under Wine, Double Commander, muCommander, Nimble Commander, and a few others, and eventually got settled with Commander One, which I found to be the least bad of the options. But it’s still rather bad, unfortunately.

Now, if you grew up on Windows Explorer, then Finder is probably pretty OK for you. You probably use your mouse and multiple windows to manage your files. But I want a single window with two panes and use my keyboard. I guess a lot of people who prefer the keyboard use a terminal, even mc. Not me. I like a GUI. I think it uses my screen better, looks better, and maybe I also just got used to it over the years.

Cmdr

That said, I was not satisfied with Commander One, at all. Some weird bugs always bothered me, and they didn’t get fixed over the years, which signals to me that its creators don’t care anymore. When I bought a home server and the connection via SMB was inexplicably slow from Commander One, it was the last straw and I started creating Cmdr.

Cmdr is:

Keyboard-first with two panes.
As fast as Total Commander.
A macOS app.

Plus I think it looks a lot more modern and nicer than TC, but that’s more subjective.

About the SMB angle: I went somewhat overboard with it, and wrote my own pure-Rust lib smb2 to ensure it’s not as slow as Commander One. It went so well that the lib is several times faster than macOS’s built-in SMB client.

Cmdr is not my ideal file manager yet but I’m working hard every day to make it that.

If you want to join me, Cmdr is now in open beta, you can it for free to manage your personal files (for work files, you’ll need to convince your manager to buy it for you), and I’d love it if you could give me feedback on it to help me make it the truly best TC-like file manager for macOS!