Not A Commander
a better (and this time graphical) rip-off of Norton Commander(tm)

by Sergey Babkin <babkin@users.sourceforge.net>

This project's purpose is a file manager for X11 with the user interface inspired by the Norton Commander (tm). Unlike the other NC clones, I try to keep the interaction with the command line unimpeded and transparent. I also try to do things more in the Unix way. The development is going in the Way of Natural Stupidity: first get sometihng working and then add the features and refine the design. The main architectural goal is to keep the architecture flexible and make future changes easy.

The current state of development is "alpha": at least all the basic features are implemented in at least a basic way.


My article about the Tk geometry managers written in Tcl is now available online - see below.


Read about how to Make Your X11 Look Like The Text Console

Look at the project from the hight of the first anniversary. (Updated on Oct 11, 2001). Some of the statements in this text are not correct, and people have told me that - I've added comments about that in italic as "2003 notes".

www.usenix.org/publications/login/2001-10/pdfs/babkin.pdf My article about the Tk geometry managers written in Tcl was printed in the October 2001 issue of ;login:, the Usenix association magazine. This article is a direct result of experiences with NAC.

I have submitted my proposals for nested lists as TIP#170. It's interesting to note that as it turns out, extensions for the lindex command, a new lset command have been already adopted in Tcl 8.4 with almost exactly completely the same syntax. So apparently, the idea is fairly obvious, since at least two people have done it independently in practically the same way. More similar features with slightly different syntax are in Tcl 8.4 as well.


Download:

(now the links point to the SourceForge download server select page, instead of the files directly as they used to)

The 1.0-ALPHA stage snapshots:

nac-1.0-SNAP-051109.tgz 203167 bytes (latest)
nac-1.0-SNAP-040203.tgz 201972 bytes
nac-1.0-SNAP-031223.tgz 200007 bytes
nac-1.0-SNAP-031119.tgz 198853 bytes
nac-1.0-SNAP-030522.tgz 193789 bytes
nac-1.0-SNAP-030408.tgz 186755 bytes
nac-1.0-SNAP-030314.tgz 179544 bytes
nac-1.0-SNAP-030223.tgz 167295 bytes
nac-1.0-SNAP-020917.tgz 161510 bytes
nac-1.0-SNAP-020814.tgz 153160 bytes
nac-1.0-SNAP-020717.tgz 150757 bytes
nac-1.0-SNAP-020419.tgz 126537 bytes
nac-1.0-SNAP-011225.tgz 126067 bytes
nac-1.0-SNAP-011205.tgz 118269 bytes
nac-1.0-SNAP-011115.tgz 113730 bytes
nac-1.0-SNAP-011011.tgz 113424 bytes
nac-1.0-SNAP-010909.tgz 109153 bytes
nac-1.0-SNAP-010713.tgz 106513 bytes
nac-1.0-SNAP-010624.tgz 102475 bytes

The prototype stage snapshots:

nac-1.0-SNAP-010516.tgz 94030 bytes
nac-1.0-SNAP-010415.tgz 90636 bytes
nac-1.0-SNAP-010330.tgz 82087 bytes
nac-1.0-SNAP-010214.tgz 63106 bytes
nac-1.0-SNAP-010116.tgz 56263 bytes
nac-1.0-SNAP-001219.tgz 42510 bytes
nac-1.0-SNAP-001126.tgz 31943 bytes
nac-1.0-SNAP-001102.tgz 25501 bytes
nac-1.0-SNAP-001027.tgz 20632 bytes


See the README file

See the CHANGES log file

See the differences between the README files of the last two releases.


The CVS repository is finally working even though there is a bit of garbage collected in it and I commit the changes infrequently. The right directory to check out is naccvs.


Subscribe to the mailing lists nac-announce (announcements about the new versions of NAC only) and nac-devel (general discussion). There has not been a whole lot of activity on these lists yet but it should start some time. :-)


Use the usual SourceForge services for NAC, such as: CVS, mailing lists and their archives, history of file releases and auto-notification, project news.


See a screen shot

This is how it looks on my machine with my favorite bitmapped font. The image is slightly blurry due to the JPEG compression. The look corresponds to the version 1.0-SNAP-010214 (though in the directory you may see a few newer files).


Want to download this font ? I've personally designed this font for PC somewhere around 1990 and later converted to BDF. In the second half of the table (codes 128-255) it contains PC presudo-graphical characters and Russian letters, available in 3 encodings: Alternative (A.K.A. IBM CP-866) - "alt9x16", Main (A.K.A. GOST-1981 A.K.A. Russian subset of ISO8859/5) - "iso9x16" and KOI-8 (A.K.A. GOST-1974) - "koi9x16".

You may also want to download the mc.ext file (that can be used by NAC) to avoid downloading the whole Midnight Commander.


To the NAC project page at SourceForge

hosted at SourceForge Logo