TOPIC: NORTON COMMANDER
A performance improvement?
4th March 2009Having just upgraded to VirtualBox 2.1.4, I noticed something surprising: a performance improvement. However, I didn't notice this with a Windows 2000 guest, but a Windows XP one now ran freely when it felt like it was immersed in treacle before. Since I had some photos to process for the hillwalking blog, that was a welcome boost and will be well-used if it continues. What's more, a Windows 7 VM that I have doesn't run so sluggish now either. These observations do point towards 2.1.2 being a sluggard on my Ubuntu box, though Windows hogs like Norton 360 didn't help matters either. Whatever the truth was, things now feel much better and any enhancement to system speed has to be a good thing.
Filename autocompletion on the command line
19th October 2007The Windows 2000 command line feels an austere primitive when compared with the wonders of the UNIX/Linux equivalent. Windows XP feels a little better, and PowerShell is another animal altogether. With the latter pair, you do get file or folder autocompletion upon hitting the TAB key. What I didn't realise until recently was that continued tabbed cycled through the possibilities; I was hitting it once and retyping when I got the wrong folder or file. I stand corrected. With the shell in Linux/UNIX, you can get a listing of possibilities when you hit TAB for the second time and the first time only gives you completion as far as it can go with certainty; you'll never get to the wrong place, though you may not get anywhere at all. This works for bash, but not ksh88 as far as I can see. It's interesting how you can take two different approaches to reach the same end.
Twin-pane Windows file managers
7th May 2007When Microsoft moved away from its two pane file manager with the advent of Windows 95, I was one of those who thought it to be a retrograde step. While two Windows Explorer instances can be tiled on a desktop, the old two-pane paradigm still has its uses and there are third party purveyors of such things. Salamander from ALTAP is one such option, as is SpeedProject's SpeedCommander. While I have been using the latter for most of a year now and would gladly pay for it but for the fact that SpeedProject's payment system isn't working. It's just as well that the demo continues to function fully following the expiry of its evaluation period. It even takes the twin pane paradigm further by adding sub-panes within each of these, but that isn't all to this major update to the Norton Commander concept. Recently, I downloaded the free version of Salamander to have a look and, though basic, it does a lot of what I ask of it, so I might continue to see how it performs and may even evaluate the commercial version to see how it goes.