I owe Norton a lot of joy for bringing orthodox file managers (the ones with two panes) and I can't live without them. They make file managing so comfortable compared to stuff like Windows Explorer or Nautilus (not saying they are bad though, I just prefer two panes).

Nowadays I mostly use clones like Midnight Commander, Krusader and Double Commander, and I used Worker (a clone of a clone, this time a clone of Directory Opus for the Amiga) for a long time before settling on Krusader as main one. The genealogy of these file managers is kind of fascinating.

Anyone else a fan?

I came to Unix from an MS-DOS background, where I used Norton Commander a lot. I used to keep an older version of NC – which would fit on a floppy – with me at all times. But on Unix, I ended up not using any of the clones; not even Midnight Commander, which was a key-for key clone, and should have fit me perfectly. It turns out you, or at least I, just don’t use Unix the same way as I did MS-DOS. When I need to manipulate files in any quantity, I use Emacs and its dired-mode.

See especially the “wdired-change-to-wdired-mode” command, now available on the usual “toggle read-only mode” keystroke C-x C-q – it’s magical.

(This has been an 11 year old repost of <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9474384>.)

I use one of its descendants, Total Commander, every day. It's one of the few applications I actually paid for, it's that critical for my daily computer usage.

What I love about it is that you get lifetime free updates.

I suspect that the author got setup for life selling it and instead of cashing out and selling it to some bigcorp (who undoubtedly would've changed the free update policy) he decided to keep the updates free forever.

I was an Amiga kid, so Directory Opus was my Norton Commander. I still use Directory Opus on Windows to this day

Does anyone remember their disk deframenter?

I had Gemini implement a simulation:

https://chrissherlock.github.io/operating-system/week10-file...