dos navigator (on linux, my own alfc!)

BloodyCactus wrote on 2025-02-28, 01:17:

dos navigator (on linux, my own alfc!)

Why do you prefer it over NC, VC, NDN, and others? What are the pros and cons?

What's alfc? alien life form commander? 🤔

I use VC 4.05.
It's a true masterpiece - contains all the basic features, and is so compact that it fits on a 1.44 MB diskette together with basic DOS files and network support.

4.99 is labelled "alpha", so I don't trust it.
Also, its only notable improvement seems to be LFN support - and I don't care about LFN in DOS.

Norton Commander - I usually install it "just in case", but hardly ever run it.
Compared with the fast and compact VC, the NC looks pretty much an overkill.

Dos Navigator was my favourite back in the era.
Nowadays, however, it's the same story as with NC - overkill.
DOS is no longer my daily driver, so I don't need an omnipotent file manager in DOS - I choose something small and fast instead...

tauro wrote on 2025-02-28, 01:02:

I'd like to be able to auto-complete files/directories in the command line using TAB.

TAB is for switching the panels, period.

Use Ctrl-Enter, Ctrl-[, Ctrl-], ...

There's also DC, DOS Controller..

I was looking for something really small and I stop to DIRECTORY CONTROL 1.4
http://optimizr.dyndns.org/dos/dc.html

Grzyb wrote on 2025-02-28, 01:45:

I use VC 4.05. It's a true masterpiece - contains all the basic features, and is so compact that it fits on a 1.44 MB diskette t […]
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I use VC 4.05.
It's a true masterpiece - contains all the basic features, and is so compact that it fits on a 1.44 MB diskette together with basic DOS files and network support.

4.99 is labelled "alpha", so I don't trust it.
Also, its only notable improvement seems to be LFN support - and I don't care about LFN in DOS.

Norton Commander - I usually install it "just in case", but hardly ever run it.
Compared with the fast and compact VC, the NC looks pretty much an overkill.

Dos Navigator was my favourite back in the era.
Nowadays, however, it's the same story as with NC - overkill.
DOS is no longer my daily driver, so I don't need an omnipotent file manager in DOS - I choose something small and fast instead...

like VC but the file editor is not complete miss too much stuff

theelf wrote on 2025-02-28, 08:53:

like VC but the file editor is not complete miss too much stuff

Well, true - no block operations, no search&replace...

But it's still good enough to quickly edit CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT - which covers 99% of my text editor usage on DOS machines.

Happy user of Volkov Commander 4.05 in every boot disk. And the main file manager and executabe laucher. Never let me down. The executable can be compressed. I used Apack and got 60kb to 40kb more or less. And never needed anything more. I have been using it for at least 30 years. Before that I used Norton Commander 3/4 with my 286. And firstly 5 with my 486, but it had too much unwanted bells and wistles. After I discovered Volkov Commander. Firstly 4.01. I never looked back.

For better file editing, i use the original Windows 9x EDIT.COM. With ultra large files or hard hacking I use Hiew.

I'm a big fan of DOS Navigator. I have it in my autoexec.bat on real DOS PCs and also on DOSBox. I agree it's sort of overkill as I don't use more than 10 - 15% of it's abilities: I don't use it to format FDDs, I don't use it as hex editor, I don't use it as spreadsheet editor and so on. But I have my own color scheme.

Also I will warn you about forks like NDN and others. They bring even more new unneeded features and they all have one big serious problem. They felt forced to rewrite original source code from old Turbo Pascal to modern Free Pascal compiler and it ended up with binaries that work very slow and make it unpleasant to use under real DOS. You can see it every time you go into directory with huge amount of files on a slower PC. For that reason alone all these mods belong to the garbage bin. Last version that were compiled using old tools was 1.51.04 and that's what I use today. It's Rainbow Software Modification version from rnbw.tsx.org website released on 21st March 2000. Website is gone but you can find it in archive.org. But in the end original 1.51 version released by RitLabs is the best version and there is no valid reason to update it.

I went through other "orthodox dual panel file managers" and there were few other interesting programs: File Wizard is heavily inspired by DOS Navigator. Star Commander is another good one. But in the end I agree that Volkov Commander is one of the best ones and I use 4.99 version on my own FDD Dos installer because it's reliable, fast and tiny.

I use Norton Commander 4.0 (I have originals) and Volkov Commander 4.05. The main reason I use these two versions is that they work on my 10Mhz Turbo-XT. They seem to copy files vastly quicker than MS-DOS so I suspect they're reading and buffering data in the 2mb EMS card I have. Not sure.

Love both programs.

uridium wrote on 2025-03-12, 02:28:

They seem to copy files vastly quicker than MS-DOS so I suspect they're reading and buffering data in the 2mb EMS card I have. Not sure.

You can make sure by temporarily removing the EMS driver.

VC definitely doesn't use EMS.
NC probably doesn't either.

Safe bet there is some disk caching software with EMS support - but this should affect both DOS and NC/VC.

Might do later tonight. I was thinking along those lines. Actually, it wouldn't surprise me if it's just getting a boost using BUFFERS=rah rah in CONFIG.SYS.

It's difficult to find apps that have decent quality-of-life features that still work on 8088/8086 class machines which I and other friends love. Yes I know things moved on and yes.. I have those systems also. 😀

I have one of my CONFIG.SYS menu config's that uses Norton's NCACHE2.EXE which works just fine on the XT running out of the EMS windows. It's not fast but it's definitely noticeably 'fast-erah' than native disk actions and I've noticed when compiling & assembling that builds are about a third than without NCACHE2 for a hobby-project I'm bashing on. 3-4minutes down to a little over a minute 20 for a full clean & build. Using 1mb of EMS for cache. Rest is used for 4DOS EMS swapping and Galaxy 3.x which supports larger text documents than a single segment via EMS && Swap Files.

Really dearly wish there was someone that built a bigger than 2Mb EMS card for 8bit and 16bit systems. The Lo-Tech one I have gets a huge amount of use from me and I wish I had larger.

AFAIR it's normal for the DOS command COPY to be slow when copying multiple files.
XCOPY should be used instead.

NC/VC can be faster than COPY, but probably not faster than XCOPY.

I still use plain old Norton Commander. Even though Volkov and DOS Navigator have their own advantages, I got the NC interface specifics so much 'ingrained' in my brain, that I found it difficult to adjust to the alternatives, and kept coming back to it.

I use Sparrow Commander v1.21 and Volkov Commander v4.05

uridium wrote on 2025-03-12, 04:55:

Really dearly wish there was someone that built a bigger than 2Mb EMS card for 8bit and 16bit systems. The Lo-Tech one I have gets a huge amount of use from me and I wish I had larger.

Hi! There's a 4MB model with a patched LTEMM driver.

https://github.com/hkzlab/ISA_EMS_4Mb
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EzCCTPdAM4

And I agree that 2MB is about minimum, my 286 had 4MB (4x 1MB SIMMs).
Even way back in 1988, Word for Windows did consume roughly 500 KB of conventional memory + 1MB of EMS for a little Word document.
For doing real work, 2MB was the bare minimum.

PS: FileMaven v3 can be used as a local file manager, too.

There's quite a few 8 or 16bit ISA cards from the late 80's and early 90's that can support more than 2MB of EMS.

I've got an Everex 178 that supports up to 8mb, for example. That coupled with 4mb onboard my 286 gives it a frankly stupid amount of memory 😂

^My AST Rampage 286 maxes out at 2MB, I think, but multiple boards can be installed.
Up to four of them, I think. That makes 8MB in total, at cost of four full-size boards full of DIP/DIL DRAMs! 😆
Must have been quite impressive at the time, especially when multitasking loads of applications under Windows 2.x or DESQView.
386 PCs with proprietary 32-Bit memory boards might have been more convenient at this point, I believe.
Another card that comes to mind is the BocaRAM card, with lots of SIMM slots.
It's probably an better investment, because there are less RAM chips that could go bad.
It also can do 8MB per card, I believe.

PS: Star Commander is an alternative, too.
It's a filetransfer program for C64 floppy drives, but it can be used as an NC clone as well.
https://sta.c64.org/sc.html