Monday, March 29, 2010

Total Commander, what a weapon!

I've used freecommander for years. It greatly improves my efficiency. Unfortunately, for some unkonwn reasons, my freecommander configuration file get corrupted after my machine power down unexpectedly several days before. Rather than making these configurations from scrarch again, I decided to give Total Commander a shot.

After I tried TC, I found it's far more powerful. TC is fully customizable, I can define any shortcut key combinations for TC internal commands or external commands defined by me. In FC, only Ctrl+[Number] is allowed to be set as shortcut key for external commands.
The most promising feature for TC is its plugin system. There are so many wonderful plugins that make TC so powerful. With packer plugin, I don't need a stand alone zip/tar/bzip2 applicaitons. With some creative filesystem plugins, task manager, regedit, dependency walker are not necessary any more. By using plugins, I can perform a lot of totally different tasks in a consistent manner, just manipulate some (fake) files in TC. This is very similar to abstraction in linux, where everything can be examined and manipulated like normal files. Abstract thinking should always be a popular idea among programmers, so I'm totally fascinated by TC.

Suggestions for Total Commander

1. Add global shortcut key. It's more convient to active total commander application with global shortcut key than pressing ctrl+tab sereval times. Though this can be achieved with tools like autohotkey, it's better if TC natively support global shortcut.

2. Improvement on command line. In windows console and linux shell, we can use tab key to complete file/command name. It's fabulous if TC also support this feature.

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