[Re: piracy and oss]

[Edward Glowacki]

Quoted from Matt Graham on Thu, Jul 26, 2001 at 12:55:32PM -0400:
> > [1] If only Midnight Commander, or Konqueror (the file manager
> > part), or any any other Unix file manager (commander type or
> > otherwise) were as good as Windows Commander...
> 
> So what's so nifty about it?  All right, I'm not the best person to judge file
> managers; Konqueror fits my needs for the most part and if I'm working with
> lots of files, a bash prompt works even better.

Well, for one, there's not much of a (useful) command prompt in Windows. =)
Some of the things I seem to use a lot about commanders in general and
Windows Commander specifically (some are comparisons to the standard
Windows explorer, others are to command prompts):

* Virtual File Systems - The ability to treat an FTP site or archive
    file [zip,tar,gzip,arc,arj,etc.] just like another directory.
    (basically you could do something like "cd foo.tar.gz ; ls" )
* File management - Copy, delete, move, rename files, including regexp
    selection of files. 
* Navigation - Keyboard instead of mouse
* File properties, sharing directories, etc. (Windows commander
    usually calls built-in Windows functions, just easier to navigate
    to the approprite file using a commander than the normal Windows
    explorer)

There are also numerous smaller features that I may not use very often.

One very typical use for me is as a GUI FTP client to select and copy
files between machines.  It's nice that I don't have to do anything
special other than make the connection, since the FTP site behaves
(almost, there are a few discrepencies) like any other locally
mounted filesystem.  I also use it to extract files from archives
(or view README's inside them before unpacking).  Combining these
two, you could go into a ZIP file on the local machine and copy
the README up to the FTP site the same way you'd copy a file between
two directories. =)  Konquerer *is* kinda cool, in that it has
built-in viewers for a lot of stuff, so you can just click on an
HTML file and view it internally in the browser, which is really
nice.  But I still think Windows Commander is easier to use than
Konqueror, especially as a file manager used from the keyboard.

I guess for me, the commander style file manager seems to work
better, and of the commander style file managers, Windows Commander
is the best.  I always feel in control when using Windows Commander,
usually in control using Midnight Commander, sometimes in control
using Konqueror, and hardly ever in control using Windows Explorer. =P

-- 
Edward Glowacki				glowack2@msu.edu
GLLUG Peon  				http://www.gllug.org
Imagination is the one weapon in the war against reality.
                -- Jules de Gaultier