File shells got wide distribution from the end 80th to the beginning of 90th years of the past century. The earliest explorers on this business were Norton and Volkov Commander, which became very popular under DOS. Windows OS gave the great number of graphic tools for creation of shells of new level. They are more beautiful outwardly and comfortable from point of ergonomics.
New applications are appeared here already. One of the first such programs became Windows Commander. It went out as early as times Windows version 3, whereupon fluently migrated on Windows 95. To the moment it used enough large popularity already. Later it was renamed in Total Commander. Today it is one of the known file managers, giving wide possibilities on interface configuring, having own API for creation of expansions (which are written very much), and also containing the great number of built-in tools for the facilitation of work. Among them are the following:
- built-in FTP-client with support of download resume after the pause and manager of sites;
- tabs support;
- comparison file contents tools;
- mass file renaming tool;
- built-in archives ZIP, TAR, GZip with support of multivolume archives and creation of SFX-archives;
- a lot of other functions and possibilities.
Total Commander spreads on shareware-licenses. Its cost makes a small sum comparatively - $38.
The other day new version 7.50 Beta 1 was presented. It is the largest update for the last time. It contains following changes:
- Full Unicode support in most functions where it is possible, including FTP, ZIP packer, and plugin interfaces
- Support for file names longer than 259 characters (up to 1022) in most file operations
- Compare by content allows to compare text files of different type, e.g. Ansi and UTF-8
- The current directory above the file lists can act as a clickable bar ("breadcrumb bar")
- Option to show *.bar file in button bar as a popup menu instead of switching bars
- Show icons and subfolders in ftp connection dialog
- Protect the stored ftp passwords with a master password using AES256 encryption
- FTP, PORT mode: Allow to specify external IP address of the Internet router
- Start Lister, compare by content or synchronize dirs directly via command line parameters
- Comments (Ctrl+Z) can now have a max. length of 4095 characters, and support line breaks
- Synchronize dirs: Option to synchronize also empty directories, option to copy just specific file properties (like the time)
- Create CRC checksums now also supports the SHA1 hash format
- Allow to use the Windows key for user-defined hotkeys
- On 64-bit Windows, allow to use 64-bit shell extensions in local menu (context menu)
- New internal command cm_SwitchX64Redirection to turn redirection of system32 dir under 64-bit Windows on/off
- Internal unpacking of multi-part RAR archives, and RAR archives where the file names are encrypted
- Copy files/directories to multiple target directories (or lnk files pointing to directories) in one operation
- Quick search with search dialog: Show button which allows to show only files/dirs matching the filter
- Switch character encodings in Lister
- New internal association system, e.g. for using Total Commander from an USB stick
You can download new Total Commander from the official page of project:
