It is a clone of Norton Commander

That's the original, yes! 🙂👍

There are freeware versions, too.:
The Northern Commander
Star Commander
Dos Navigator
Volkov Commander

PTS DOS has a NC clone, too, but I don't remember its name.

I also thought Midnight got ported (back?) to DOS, by my recollection around 1997, which probably puts in the memory hole between CDROM archival of active DOS ftps and archive.org managing to archive more than just the top web sites.

hmmm, only dug up the Win32 version so far.. https://web.archive.org/web/20020214204726/ht … .bez/mc/mc.html

Jo22 wrote on 2024-01-01, 20:17:

That's the original, yes! 🙂👍 […]
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That's the original, yes! 🙂👍

There are freeware versions, too.:
The Northern Commander
Star Commander
Dos Navigator
Volkov Commander

PTS DOS has a NC clone, too, but I don't remember its name.

Those look like good alternatives. Do you know if any of them have support for long file names?

7F20 wrote on 2024-01-01, 21:53:

Those look like good alternatives. Do you know if any of them have support for long file names?

I know that Norton Commander 5.5 and Star Commander has.
https://sta.c64.org/starlfn.html

The Volkov Commander apparently has support in a Beta version, but I have little experience here.

It's being mentioned here:

https://www-user.tu-chemnitz.de/~heha/hsn/dos … what_lfn.en.htm

According to this link, DOS Navigator OSP 3.7.0 supports LFNs, too.

http://individual.utoronto.ca/wengier/doslfns.htm

So essentially all of them may support LFNs. 🙂👍

Edit: NC clones. There's GO-Commander v1.0 and also Byte Manager v1.23..
Jet Commander V 3.47 supports LFN, too, I believe.

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-01-01, 20:43:

I also thought Midnight got ported (back?) to DOS, by my recollection around 1997, which probably puts in the memory hole between CDROM archival of active DOS ftps and archive.org managing to archive more than just the top web sites.

hmmm, only dug up the Win32 version so far.. https://web.archive.org/web/20020214204726/ht … .bez/mc/mc.html

I vaguely remember using Northern Commander in the mid-90s.. It looked a bit like Midnight Commander.
It was on a shareware CD-ROM.
Couldn't find it online, though.

Why do you not use Doszip Commander (v2.65 or some older version should work well for dos)?
Doszip Commander is an LFN-aware TUI file manager (NC clone) with built-in Zip and UnZip for DOS and Windows
https://sourceforge.net/p/freedos/news/2023/0 … -commander-265/

I don't think there ever was Midnight Commander for DOS.

MC was originally for Unix, and is very Unix-centric.
At certain point it got ported to OS/2 and Win32 - it was fairly easy, as there are tools designed especially for porting code from Unix, see eg. EMX+GCC and Cygwin.

DOS, however, is too limited - no easy way to port anything non-trivial from Unix.

https://sourceforge.net/p/mcwin32/discussion/ … ead/b4f0fb5aed/

marxveix wrote on 2024-01-02, 00:01:

Why do you not use Doszip Commander (v2.65 or some older version should work well for dos)?
Doszip Commander is an LFN-aware TUI file manager (NC clone) with built-in Zip and UnZip for DOS and Windows
https://sourceforge.net/p/freedos/news/2023/0 … -commander-265/

That's, cool! Never heard of it before.
When I searched for it, I've also found DCC - DOS Command Center.

https://daryldixonretro.111mb.de/DCC.html

It's available in both English and German.

Wished more NC clones had such an localization available. 🙂👍

Grzyb wrote on 2024-01-02, 00:19:

I don't think there ever was Midnight Commander for DOS. […]
Show full quote

I don't think there ever was Midnight Commander for DOS.

MC was originally for Unix, and is very Unix-centric.
At certain point it got ported to OS/2 and Win32 - it was fairly easy, as there are tools designed especially for porting code from Unix, see eg. EMX+GCC and Cygwin.

DOS, however, is too limited - no easy way to port anything non-trivial from Unix.

https://sourceforge.net/p/mcwin32/discussion/ … ead/b4f0fb5aed/

I think it also has to do that *nix people don't feel comfortable with DOS platform, not to say Windows.

There might be religious reasons (everything's a file, permissions everywhere) as well as opposite dogmas (Assembly vs C).

Still, it would have been possible to port a simple file manager to DOS.
DESQView /X provided X11 and necessary files for porting *nix applications.

Also, I believe there was a set of *nix utilities written for DOS in the late 80s. It was freeware or public domain or something.
It contained some of the standard commands as individual files. "Internal commands" vs "external commands" in DOS terms.

Midnight Commander was written by Miguel de Icaza of gnome infamy. If you know anything about gnome, that stuff is about far away as could be from being ported to anything other than linux. On the other hand, kde has been ported to windows for example. So this isn't a *nix thing, as much as it is a developers choice, which happens all the time. For being a file manager, it wouldn't have really been that difficult to make it portable, as there is a little bit of *nix everything is a file on about every platform now. Although I'm not sure why one would want to have mc on dos, when so many dos clones exist. If anything, mc exists only because there were no nc clones on gnu/linux at the time, yet there was nc already on dos, and several more to come. It's probably possible to get mc running on windows easy, but dos is quite limited, so I'd expect it would have been hard in this case, despite it is seemingly a simple program, it's probably not simple underneath.

That makes a ton of sense. Thinking about it now I realize that I've only ever used MC on linux flavors. I only asked about it because I have been using it a lot over the past 10 years and I'm very used to it.

marxveix wrote on 2024-01-02, 00:01:

Why do you not use Doszip Commander (v2.65 or some older version should work well for dos)?
Doszip Commander is an LFN-aware TUI file manager (NC clone) with built-in Zip and UnZip for DOS and Windows
https://sourceforge.net/p/freedos/news/2023/0 … -commander-265/

Thanks! So far I like this one the best. It most closely resembles MC to me.

Let's try this...

1# ps_mem -p 30994
2 Private  +   Shared  =  RAM used	Program 
3
4  2.0 MiB + 652.5 KiB =   2.7 MiB	mc
5---------------------------------
6                          2.7 MiB
7=================================

And that's a freshly started instance of MC, doing nothing.
So, no way to port it to Real mode.

First, we would need a 32-bit DOS extender.
Second, get rid of all the Unix (or any multitasking OS)-specific stuff.
Third, memory usage could be pretty high - don't expect it to run on a low-end 386.

Overall, it's perfectly possible to port MC to DOS, but it would require a lot of work, and the result would always feel like a "foreign body".

.. FAR Manager is Win32-centric, but got ported to MenuetOS/Kolibri OS, anyway.

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

http://wiki.kolibrios.org/wiki/File:Example.png

Where's a will, there's a way, I suppose? 🤷‍♂️

7F20 wrote on 2024-01-02, 03:43:

marxveix wrote on 2024-01-02, 00:01:

Why do you not use Doszip Commander (v2.65 or some older version should work well for dos)?
Doszip Commander is an LFN-aware TUI file manager (NC clone) with built-in Zip and UnZip for DOS and Windows
https://sourceforge.net/p/freedos/news/2023/0 … -commander-265/

Thanks! So far I like this one the best. It most closely resembles MC to me.

I use it also, works well for me.

if you have a somewhat fast DOS system (486DX2+) I can recommend Necromancer's Dos Navigator : http://ndn.muxe.com
the dpmi32 version is the one to get

Volkov Commander is my favorite, very small and very effective..