Norton Commander

The Norton Commander is the most useful DOS program ever written. Symantec (The makers of NC) dropped the ball when Windows 95 arrived. They now have Norton Navigator, which is not really any different than Windows Explorer. There is a Norton Commander for Windows 95 that was written overseas (Ireland, I believe), but many of these Shareware "Commanders" are better implementations. There does seem to be a Commander program for every OS: Unix, Linux, OS/2, Windows, and DOS. I haven't found one for the MacOS, but I don't have a Mac, so I haven't looked very hard.

A Commander program has to have the two panel interface and the standard F key assignments: F3 - View, F4 - Edit, F5 - Copy, F6 - Rename/Move, F7 - Make Directory, and F8 - Delete. Also, support for whatever compressed archive is standard for the OS, ZIP for DOS/Windows, tar.gz for Unix, etc. The ever present command line is also a super handy feature.

Windows Explorer and File manager are not very good at Exploring or managing. The Norton Commander interface is much more intuitive. Virtually all of these programs have built in ZIP/UNZIP capabilities, eliminating the need for third party compression programs. Since ZIP archives are handled the same as files and directories, there is no need to learn another interface.