Sticky wrote:This seems like a very appropriate question. Or what I really would like to know is what first interested you in Total Commander?
Spikey wrote:TC makes it hard to do by having a non-standard and non-intuitive GUI plus a help text which offers no extra help about navigating to commands.
Spikey, everytime you see a hyphen, replace it with a > and the help may begin to make more sense to you. Although I understand what you are saying, many of us think that the TC GUI is very intuitive. Hence the reason Lefteous has asked you what, specifically, you had trouble finding.
Hi Stickey. I am a bit of veteran in computing and I find that of all the technical people in a corporation it is usually only the computer department which communicates its technology so badly to non-technical people. IYSWIM.
Other technical departments like the air conditioning engineers, building infrastructure engineers and so on speak in plain English. If the corporation is a chemicals manufacurer then the hardcore chemists still speak in plain English to others when describing their work.
All that above is by way of saying that PC techies just love being PC techies
and live that techie hobbyist life so completely that they almost don't realise that PC ideas can actually be conveyed in plain English and that a lot of their "deep technical knowledge" is actually simple stuff spoken in jargon. But jargon can be translated and their assumptions be made clearer.
And that is what I think is happening in this case. TC is a technician's wonder-toy and the technicians can't understand why anyone would want to walk up and use it. Hey no. We have to use special key conventions and make sure they are non standard!
We have to put our propellor hats on [just joking] and have a real conversation about processor wait states and lock functionality and if we mention a software driver we shall always talk about the driver as if it was hardware and make sure no one new can follow what we are talking about.
I am only partly joking when I say that we techies will muddle up our conversations to throw people off the scent and so we will talk about MP3 bitrates we will leave off the "kbit/second" part to make sure the listener gets it confused with the sampling rate and just to really shake them off we will throw in "bit depth" from time to time as well as a set of different numbers for frequency response.
Heh heh! I used to lecture in computing. It doesn't have to be hard for the student although it often is - but for no good reason.
To answer your question about what interested me in TC, I can say that I like some of its specialized functions which many one pane and two pane file managers don't have. I have approximately 15 different file managers on my PC (I have never bothered to count them all) and various file manager type utilities like FileLocator Pro (Agent Ransack), directory printers, XYplorer (lovely high function one pane file manager and searcher). I still like PowerDesk Pro, never was impressed with later versions of Norton Utils after about v4, don't use Salamander all that much because it looks backward, xplorer2 is a sweetie, Magellen offers better 4DOS descript.ion file support to me than any of TC's plugins, etc. Am not an Xtree dinosaur though, so be careful of saying that!
But TC is the mystery one. So much damn function and such a poor interface through which to access it. I like my hotkey shortcut keyboard interface as much as anyone who has gone beyond point-&-click but TC remains just odd!
How hard can it be to add a single navigation line to every help pane that describes a command? It's not hard at all.
Spikey
