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Norton Commander

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See Norton Commander (motorcycle) for the rotary-engined motorcycle.

Norton Commander (commonly shortened to "NC") is an Orthodox File Manager (OFM) program, written by John Socha and released by Peter Norton Computing (later acquired by the Symantec corporation). NC is a file manager which essentially acts as the text user interface for DOS. It was officially produced by Symantec between 1986 and 1998. The last DOS version of Norton Commander, 5.51 (only its install.cfg and timestamp indicates it's not v5.5), was released on July 1, 1998.

Background

Captain Norton, the Norton Commander mascot (note his trademark cap and white gloves, used in NC 5.51 *.ICO files)

Ease of use of NC is based on constant ability to confront two file manipulation objects at once. After starting the program, the user sees two panels with file lists, each of which can be easily configured to show information about the other panel, a directory tree, or a number of other options. At the bottom of the screen, NC displays a list of commands, extended on demand by the CTRL and ALT keys. Thus, without heavy use of the mouse (though mouse functionality was integrated around version 3.0), the user is able to perform many file manipulation actions quickly and efficiently. In addition, the built-in text file viewer (called with F3) and editor (F4) made NC in fact the DOS tool for power users.

After Microsoft released Windows 95 and a large number of users migrated to the new graphic OS, NC became less popular due to the popularity of Windows Explorer and lack of supporting new Long File Names (LFN) standard. In turn, Symantec released NC 5.51, which supports the LFNs and thus became again useful on a typical Windows partition. NC 5.51 uses the LFN API, and if user wants to use LFNs, it must work in Windows GUI, or in presence of DOSLFN or similar TSR while working in plain DOS. Otherwise LFN support doesn't work and NC 5.51 would have to truncate LFNs.

Despite the decline in its use, Norton Commander was very popular during the DOS era and it has been extensively cloned. These clones are further described below.

After releasing traditional NC 5.51 with added LFN support, a new pure graphical version of Norton Commander was introduced by Symantec in 1999, Norton Commander for Windows. This version fully integrates with Windows (supports even more sophisticated LFNs and the Recycle Bin) and also provides close integration with a Quick View program that enables one to view files such as documents from various Microsoft Office programs, in one of the panels. The last Windows version of Norton Commander, 2.01, was released on February 1, 1999.


For many long-time users and computer collectors, Norton Commander is a valued piece of software and an object of late-1980s nostalgia, beginning to get rarer and more valuable as time passes.

Norton Commander inspired software

See also: Category:Orthodox file managers

There are several Norton Commander imitations and clones. Examples are:

There are also other non-OFM software inspired by NC's look and feel, such as archivers, viewers, hexadecimal editors and more. Mostly these are DOS tools. Examples are:

  • Commandline ACE archiver for DOS and Windows, and is the only existing OFM compressor that supports LFN
  • Hiew hexadecimal editor
  • Pksmart EXE packer for DOS
  • RAR archiver for DOS and Windows
  • RAX archiver for DOS

See also

Screenshots

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