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Nice explanation but as this points out,
MS is going after anyone using "Windows" not just "Microsoft Windows" or
"Microsoft Windows Operating System"

Not my trademark. I was posting from the Windows Commander homepage. Windows/Total Commander is made by Christian Ghisler, not me. I must not have made it clear enough in my posting.

Windows Commander is now Total Commander!

Why this name change? In Summer 2002, we received a letter from attorneys representing the owner of the trademark Windows. In this letter they expressed concerns that our usage of the name could lead to confusion with their own products. In particular, people could think that our program could be from their company. We were indirectly asked to change the name of our software.

Because Windows is registered as a trademark, we didn't want to risk a lawsuit, and decided to change the name. It's important to mention that we have been treated in a very fair way: There have never been any legal threats, and we could negotiate a transitional period until the end of the year. We ask you to consider this, and not to make any negative comments - especially in the forum. Because we are legally responsible for its contents, it could bring us into deep legal troubles. Please also do not contact us because of the new name. As a small company, we couldn't handle the big amount of messages. We will not give more information about the name change anyway.

The original name Windows Commander was chosen more by coincidence. There were already many Commander-style programs for DOS (e.g. DOS Command Center, DOS Controller, and the Norton Commander), but hardly any for Windows. The word Commander was standing already at this time - 9 years ago - for a whole class of file managers with 2 windows side by side. Windows Commander was one of the very first such programs for Windows, therefore the chosen name was quite logical.

The new name Total Commander was chosen together with a trademark attorney. Total Commander was also registered as a trademark. Thanks to the new name, we now also have new possibilities to offer similar products for other platforms, e.g. for PocketPC or Linux. The name should stand for the fact that the program puts you in total command over your files. It allows you to see what is really saved on the harddisk, and helps you to manipulate all files directly.

We can only speculate why the owner of the name 'Windows' has become active just now (after 9 years). On one side, they have been put under pressure by the usage of their (slightly changed) name by the Linux community. There have been reproaches that they wouldn't be actively defending their name, and losing their trademark this way. On the other side, someone else had just registered the domain www.windowscommander.com (which we own ourselves in the meantime). The company may have noticed us because of this registration.

Most of the "Commanders" do this, internally, as well as faking lots of other stuff as local filesystems, making everything work seemlessly between archives, ftp, local files etc. Insanely good for productivity, and the learning curve involves one program instead of five.

Try:

Midnight commander on Linux (often, typing "mc" is enough), windows commander on Windows.

I'm anxiously awaiting a release of Windows Commander for Linux. Rumor has it that the holdup was the release of Kylix... WC is constantly loaded on my W2k box.

I just don't understand how the explorer type file manager won out of the norton commander 2 paned layout. Drag and drop or no mouse at all, it's the best of both worlds.

I don't hear anyone warring over Norton File Manager anymore and how it can't be purchased because Win 9x/NT/2k comes with one, so that horse is dead and beaten and has long since mouldered away.

There's a few of us die-hards left that have taken up the use of Windows Commander. It's a really spiffy Norton Commander clone that has a lot of addons, like FTP and serial file transfer. Everybody that I've shown it to has hated it at first, but after watching me use it for five minutes, has been converted. It's the bomb.

Of course, I know it'll never take over any serious market hold, but I don't care. I use it because it's simultaneously more powerful and yet more easy to use than Windows Explorer.

Maybe some other OFM for Unix has similar features available...

--

The other day my friend showed me a really nifty piece of software called podfuk. It basically (so far as I can tell) combines vfs libraries from Midnight Commander and the CODA filesystem... so you can cd into tar files or ftp sites

Windows Commander (www.ghisler.com) does all that. It's the only thing that allows me to keep my sanity in windows. It does all of the major archive formats (except bzip). PKZip, tar, and gzip/compress is implemented internally, and most other formats work provided you have the proper commandline software (rar, arj, uc2, ace, etc). It even performs "magic" (as in the file command) to determine archive types, so you can cd into a zip file even if it was accidentally named with any other extension. It does ftp vfs as well, and it does that quite well. It's improved on the MC way of doing it, too. Ctrl-F does it. MC's way kind of annoys me, especially if you mistype the site name and have to wait for it to figure out the site is down (though I've taken to just killing it nowadays).

I was thinking of making my own similar file manager for KDE, based more on Windows Commander with some MC things thrown in like file colourisation.