Norton Commander 5.5 FTW

Maybe one of the FreeDOS programs would meet your needs.

Volkov Commander 4.05 has never caused me any trouble, and is fully written in assembly. So small and fast.

I'm using Norton Commander too. It was absolutely ubiquitous in Russia and CIS countries in the 90s, so that's what I grew up with. It's really feature-packed and can even work with archived files (at least with zip archives). Really solid choice and this is what I use on all of my DOS machines to this day.

Volkov Commander was pretty popular, too. It was often used on boot floppies and warez CDs because it is really light. I've never used it extensively, though, so I'm not sure about the functionality.

EXPLORER.EXE

DN, directory navigator.

DN, Dos Navigator

DOS Controller (dc.com) by Soren Kragh. Freeware, can be found by googling a bit. Extremely small, written in Assembler, faster than Norton Commander, less memory footprint. Does most of the stuff and has same user interface.

root42 wrote:

DOS Controller (dc.com) by Soren Kragh. Freeware, can be found by googling a bit. Extremely small, written in Assembler, faster than Norton Commander, less memory footprint. Does most of the stuff and has same user interface.

Limitations:
Doesn't list some CD-ROM or RAM disks (XMSDSK).
Can't copy directories.

umm, wow

root42 wrote:

DOS Controller (dc.com) by Soren Kragh. Freeware, can be found by googling a bit. Extremely small, written in Assembler, faster than Norton Commander, less memory footprint. Does most of the stuff and has same user interface.

Just for the sake of the discussion, I did try this one and it is indeed very small and fast. But it's missing a very important feature which was a deal breaker for me: copying whole directories.
edit: rasz_pl beat me to that

True, the recursive copy feature is a bummer. However I managed to work around it. Under DOS you tend to have not very nested directory structures.

CD-ROM support is currently no problem for me, since my 386 doesn't have one. 😉

So dc.com is probably best for very old PCs, working off floppies and/or with limited RAM and CPU.

@ foil_fresh

1. Are you using Smartdrive ? That should speed up the loading of Dosshell quite a bit.

2. What kind of drive are you using? If a regular HDD, you can gain a whole lot of speed by changing to a fast CF card or SSD. Access times are the big factor here.

root42 wrote:

DOS Controller (dc.com) by Soren Kragh. Freeware, can be found by googling a bit. Extremely small, written in Assembler, faster than Norton Commander, less memory footprint. Does most of the stuff and has same user interface.

Doesn't really matter with norton commander, as it is able to almost completely unload itself before executing any program...

There are some people what work on a project called ReDOS: http://www.orbitalcrew.com/redos.html# , https://www.facebook.com/F.H.OrbitalCrew
They uploaded a boot video on facebook, I have no idea how to get a link to share but here are some shots of it, kinda looks like workbench . They said it runs all DOS software , maybe based on freedos? looks interesting.

wow, thanks for all the reccomendations. Norton commander seems promising.

cyclone3d wrote:

@ foil_fresh

1. Are you using Smartdrive ? That should speed up the loading of Dosshell quite a bit.

2. What kind of drive are you using? If a regular HDD, you can gain a whole lot of speed by changing to a fast CF card or SSD. Access times are the big factor here.

No smartdrive (or at least I don't think so), i'll check that out. I'm using dos 7 from Win98se - is smartdrv a feature in w98?

When I wrote this post I was using CF, but my SD adapter came in the mail yesterday and reinstalling onto that tonight. it should speed things up a tiny tad.

I used Quickmenu III by Neosoft to orginise my old dos system. It has a file manager built and a lot of other useful utilities in it as well. Fits on a 720k floppy disk and can be used on XT class systems. To use backgrounds you'll need EMS. You can create submenus as well.Uses mouse and/or keyboard shortcuts.

"Quikmenu 3 is a fully graphical, icon based Dos menu. It allows you to easily create a menu for all your Dos programs and games with icons, marcos, and even phone connections! It comes with several internal utilities including a calculator, calendar, phone book, and a time log to keep track of what programs you use. It also has a easy to use, yet powerful file manager utility. Finally, you could also use Quikmenu on a network and send E-Mail right through its built in mailer!"

Disk(Unregistered) just a nag screen iirc

Extra Icons

I used to rock Quikmenu3, great GUI for DOS.

Looks like NeoSoft is passing on it's software development to an outfit in Spain. Use to have links to their old Dos stuff as well on the website but unfortunately not anymore. I got NeoPaint off them as well back in the day. That and QM3 ran really well on a 286/16 with 4megs of ram.

Caluser2000 wrote:

I used Quickmenu III by Neosoft to orginise my old dos system. It has a file manager built and a lot of other useful utilities i […]
Show full quote

I used Quickmenu III by Neosoft to orginise my old dos system. It has a file manager built and a lot of other useful utilities in it as well. Fits on a 720k floppy disk and can be used on XT class systems. To use backgrounds you'll need EMS. You can create submenus as well.Uses mouse and/or keyboard shortcuts.

02_QuikMenu_III_Weeds_Main_Menu.png

"Quikmenu 3 is a fully graphical, icon based Dos menu. It allows you to easily create a menu for all your Dos programs and games with icons, marcos, and even phone connections! It comes with several internal utilities including a calculator, calendar, phone book, and a time log to keep track of what programs you use. It also has a easy to use, yet powerful file manager utility. Finally, you could also use Quikmenu on a network and send E-Mail right through its built in mailer!"

Disk(Unregistered) just a nag screen iirc

QuikMenu_III.zip

Extra Icons

QuikMenu_III_Weeds_Icons_Library.zip

nice! i will try this one out for sure.