Talk:Norton Commander

The last version

Norton Commander 2.01 for Windows is, essentially not NC 5.5 for DOS, the last true version of NC that piggy-backed on DOS and relayed DOS commands directly. It is therefore misleading to say that development continued until 1999. It is common knowledge that when Windows 95 hit the market, Symantec nearly pulled the plug on NC, to pull it finally in 1998. --NeoThe1 05:45, August 16, 2005 (UTC)

The latest and unfortunately, last version of Norton Commander was 5.5. It added Long Filenames Support (in Windows 9x/ME DOS prompt or with DOSLFN driver in plain DOS). —Preceding unsigned comment added by 212.54.219.178 (talk • contribs) 17:24, 4 October 2005

NC 5.5 for DOS is considered "abandonware" today, and was unavailable on internet for long time. But now hopefully Abandonia recently began to provide NC 5.5 English on their internet site. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.96.246.190 (talk • contribs) 27 November 2005

I was recently shocked, when I was given a copy of NC 5.5, apparently released in 1998 and with LFN support. It is, however, extremely buggy, crashes a lot and is extremely slow, but only on NT systems. If anyone is interested in acquiring a copy, however, drop me a line by e-mail, or look at Abandonia.--NeoThe1 20:42, 26 November 2005 (UTC)

Abandonia recently began to provide localized versions of *.IMG copies of original NC 5.5 for DOS installation floppy disks in English, German, Russian and Polish language versions. The same happened with Vetusware abandonware site, but too with NC 2.01 for Windows. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.5.16.174 (talk • contribs) 17:16, 20 August 2006

Too many acronyms

This article over-uses acronyms. boffy_b 00:37, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

Choice of words

After Microsoft released Windows 95 and a large number of users migrated to the new graphic OS, NC temporarily became less popular due to the forced popularity of Windows Explorer and lack of supporting new Long File Names (LFN) standard.

"temporarily" and "forced" might be words one wish to avoid since there's absolutely nothing backing up their usage referenced in the article. Nobody was forced to use Windows Explorer, and I don't see anywhere that NC gained any significant popularity after its decline. Debolaz 13:55, 26 January 2007 (UTC)

Popularity of Windows Explorer was forced by bundling it with Windows, thus Windows users for saving money used only Windows Explorer, forgetting about Norton Commander, because it would be additional expense for them. NC's demise was done in similar way as Netscape Navigator's demise.

"Forced" is still the wrong word to use here. While I don't disagree with that a bundled Windows Explorer making Norton Commander somewhat redundant for many users, no party in this situation were forced to anything. Netscape's demise wasn't as black and white either. While Microsoft certainly did their best to gain position in the market there, Netscape Communications did a lot of things that made Microsoft's job a lot easier, as mentioned in the Netscape Navigator article. But as I said, I don't disagree much on what happened except I think sales figures for NC should probably be referenced if the decline were indeed only temporary. Debolaz 15:50, 27 January 2007 (UTC)

I mentioned forcing NC demise by its partial redundance with Windows Explorer.

Midnight Commander primarily for Unix-like systems, but also works on Windows and Mac OS X

Uh, Mac OS X *is* a Unix-like system. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 132.250.138.82 (talk) 16:50, 8 November 2007 (UTC)

Better use AT&T Plan 9 from Bell Labs than AT&T Unix and all its derivatives, because AT&T Plan 9 is single unified AT&T Unix successor, while AT&T Unix and all its derivative families are very confused and divided. Wikinger (talk) 20:44, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

OS/2 Development

File Commander was a very close clone of NC. I used it extensively with OS/2 and I think it was back-ported to run under Windows NT in character mode. Of all the NC clones I used FC was the closest to the original with some nice extensions.

I've played with at least 4-5 other clones for Windows in the past. They never quite got all the details right, NC for DOS was fanatical about details. It fully leveraged function keys to the left of the keyboard, and suffered when their use was deprecated under Windows. NC didn't work quite as well once the function keys went to the top of the kb.

One of the key features of earlier versions of NC was a fully integrated email client called MCIMail. It was an extremely efficient mail client, I'm not sure anything I've ever used since was quite as productive. It predated internet mail of course.

I miss NC a great deal. I'd be happy to use an optimized tool with Windows or OS X, but I must note that this kind of software requires an extraordinary attention to detail and reliability. It's hard to fund such development in today's environment, and neither OS X nor Vista/XP are as friendly to alternative file management tools as were DOS or Win 3.x. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Jfaughnan (talk • contribs) 17:40, 26 March 2007 (UTC).

The same friendliness applies to Windows 9x/Me. 83.5.3.137 18:24, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

Download links

Please remove download links. This is a proprietary software and it is NOT freely available! Those sites infighting rights of copyright holders. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 89.174.127.173 (talk) 18:25, 25 December 2007 (UTC)

This is not needed at all. This software was ABANDONED forever, and is not sold anymore and anywhere. 83.5.9.222 (talk) 17:30, 31 December 2007 (UTC)

It really doesn't matter if it's not sold anymore, Symantec still holds the copyright to the program and has not given permission for it to be redistributed as far as I know. While I don't really morally disagree with the so called abandonware archives, it is illegal in the US and several other countries to provide links to material infringing on copyright so they should be removed from Wikipedia. However, if I'm wrong about Symantec not giving permission, do correct me. Debolaz (talk) 00:33, 1 January 2008 (UTC)

This is nonsense. How can you seriously maintain that Symantec actually has copyright claims with regard to NC if a) Symantec no longer exists, as such and b) it has neither developed, claimed copyright protection, or showed any public interest whatsoever in this software? NeoThe1 (talk) 19:34, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

Completely irrelevant. Symantec exists, it doesn't need to have developed the software, nor claimed copyright over it. This is how copyright law works. By having links to downloads of the copyrighted software, Wikipedia violates US copyright law. And just because other websites does this doesn't make it right. Debolaz (talk) 19:58, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

Symantec, or whoever owns Symantec, retains copyright of the software regardless of how old it is, or how much it is currently developed. Even if Symantec has not pursued those who illegally copy this software, does not make it legal or "abandoned". This means it is not allowed on Wikipedia, and will be removed regardless of your opinion. The359 (talk) 23:18, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

NDOS

Wasn't NDOS shipped with NC? 70.51.8.158 (talk) 08:26, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

No, it wasn't. It was shipped with Norton Utilities. --78.53.87.174 (talk) 12:00, 14 April 2009 (UTC)

Norton Desktop

There's no article on the similar Symantec product... NDD/NDW 70.51.8.158 (talk) 08:26, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

WinNc (Shareware)

What about this clone of Norton Commander? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 164.2.255.244 (talk) 00:21, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

What about it? Just another out of hundreds of orthodox file managers. -- œ^™ 04:47, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

Sources

"(commonly shortened to "NC"[by whom?])"

The question "by whom?" isn't correct in this context. In the DOS-days it wasn't uncommon to name programs like their main executable file, which in case of Norton Commander was "NC.EXE". Only the suffix (".EXE", ".COM" or in some cases even ".BAT") was omitted. Although this isn't always clear, since many programs had names with 8 or less characters, because 8.3 characters was all the FAT-filesystem could handle (and a program needed one of the three "executable-suffixes" to run).

I just leave it up to you to edit it out, since I'm pretty new here and I don't want to risk scrambling the whole page with that.

Just me today (talk) 09:22, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

Broken reference

The reference link for the following:

the IntelliJ IDE used to include a "Commander" plugin that performed file manipulation using the same shortcut keys as Norton Commander

is broken and I believe the whole thing should be deleted as there is no clear way to support that claim anymore.--RoJi (talk) 03:20, 7 July 2018 (UTC)

References

Automatic redirect from vdos

There's software called vDOS to run DOS programs on modern Windows, and an alternative to DosBox.

It seems Wikipedia doesn't have an entry on this. I could create at least a stub for that SW, however 'vdos' automatically redirects here. I don't know how to cancel that or create the 'you might be looking for xxx' link or create a fork page (?) that would link both here and to the new vDOS page...

Can someone assist?

85.216.233.211 (talk) 10:53, 19 December 2018 (UTC)