4 ms·

Oh man, this tugs on all sorts of sentimental DOS strings. Especially that first phrase about people under 30 not knowing what DOS is. When was the last time y

Oh man, this tugs on all sorts of sentimental DOS strings. Especially that first phrase about people under 30 not knowing what DOS is. When was the last time you have used the B: drive? Anyway, an interesting thing is that growing up in Russia, using DOS, we were all gung-ho about using Norton Commander and its clones, such as DOS Navigator, to supplement the vanilla command-line DOS experience. And I'm telling you, it was oh such a great experience, that to this day, I still wonder how I manage to get by in my vanilla command line bash shell. Sure, all the auto-complete tricks are insanely useful (and maybe that's all we really needed?), but I recall the whole two-directory layout was super useful in being able to move files around and do quick edits and what not. Midnight Commander just doesn't do it for me. I tried FAR Manager on Windows, and also no dice. They all feel heavy and not as natural. To put it into perspective, anyone who's really really into VIM, think about how you love how fast you can be with VIM, despite the obscure key combinations and the modal overhead (haha, bias showing?). Anyway, think about how once you get used to all that power, you wonder how you can survive without it anywhere else. That's what using Norton Commander /DOS Navigator was like in MS-DOS. Using a Solaris/HP-UX command line circa 1998 felt like going back to stone age.

mkhattab 14y ago
> Oh man, this tugs on all sorts of sentimental DOS strings. Especially that first phrase about people under 30 not knowing what DOS is. I'm under 30 (28) and I still remember DOS and breaking (running arbitrary commands on) my Dad's work laptop, that he never used. The single greatest benefit of FreeDOS is letting me play my old games, specifically "Are You Afraid of the Dark? The Tale of Orpheo's Curse."[1] This is, still, one of the most entertaining games I've played. I replay the game every year or two as a personal tradition. Some day I'll force my kids to play it. [1]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rj4gsrXUjA4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rj4gsrXUjA4
pavel_lishin 14y ago
> growing up in Russia, using DOS, we were all gung-ho about using Norton Commander and its clones One of my earliest memories is my grandmother teaching me "нц" (nc, apparently the Norton Commander binary) so I could navigate my way to Tetris. (Yes, we're that stereotypical.)
bad_user 14y ago
My first computer had DOS 6.22 and Windows for Workgroups 3.11 on it. I was a Norton Commander user, however I do not have such fond memories of it. Yes it was more efficient than navigating and doing stuff at the raw command line, but that's only because the command-line in DOS and Windows completely sucks in all ways imaginable. Nowadays my command-line only feels limiting whenever I want thumbnails on my files ... like when searching for a PDF, or rearranging my photos folder. In such instances NC would be useless anyway.
pjmlp 14y ago
> Oh man, this tugs on all sorts of sentimental DOS strings. Especially that first phrase about people under 30 not knowing what DOS is. Not only that, youth generation seems not able to separate the distintion between programming languages and their implementations. They all think a strong type language (a la Pascal/Ada) with GC needs can only exist in a VM, dynamic languages (a la Lisp) cannot be compiled to native code or C like languages are always compiled to native code. I tend to think we were able to grasp these subjects much better.
- derleth 14y ago
  > Not only that, youth generation seems not able to separate the distintion between programming languages and their implementations. To be fair, this has always been true. Look at the old idea "Lisp is Slow", which is literally nonsense once you gain the ability to separate language from implementation.
thristian 14y ago
I was a Norton Commander fan back in the days of DOS, and so when I moved to Linux, I've always had a soft-spot for Midnight Commander... just, you know, not enough to actually use it for anything. It's always puzzled me that Norton Commander was so indispensable for DOS, but Midnight Commander is not so useful under Linux. I think the reason is just that the file-management I do these days is very different from what I needed to do under DOS; I don't have to copy files around to or from floppies to transfer them, nor do I have to shuffle files around from one partition to another to maintain enough disk space. I don't even have to navigate between all the different directories where my apps are installed, because in Linux they're all on my $PATH. Using MC, I really miss bash's tab-completion (Esc-Tab completion isn't the same) although ^S incremental search helps. The NC copy/move/rename dialogs are really designed around the MS-DOS semantics of filename globbing (under DOS, you can say "copy .doc .bak" to make a backup of every document, but "cp .doc .bak" does something very different in Linux), so coping/moving/renaming files in Midnight Commander feels weird. I dunno, I want to like Midnight Commander, but I just think it's a brilliantly-designed user-interface for solving problems that don't exist, or don't exist in the same form, as they did in MS-DOS.
- dredmorbius 14y ago
  As someone who dislikes GUI file navigators, the two uses I find for MC are as a file archive explorer and for remote file operations. MC will open tarballs of various compression variants, ar archives, etc., and in particular, RPM and DEB files). Want to dig out something without expanding and digging through the archive? Use MC. Similarly, you can access remote systems (via ssh) as if they were local, though I'll more often use lftp's fish:// protocol. Or lately, sshfs. Which I suppose more or less makes your point that under Linux these are mostly solved problems.

mkhattab 14y ago

> Oh man, this tugs on all sorts of sentimental DOS strings. Especially that first phrase about people under 30 not knowing what DOS is. I'm under 30 (28) and I still remember DOS and breaking (running arbitrary commands on) my Dad's work laptop, that he never used. The single greatest benefit of FreeDOS is letting me play my old games, specifically "Are You Afraid of the Dark? The Tale of Orpheo's Curse."[1] This is, still, one of the most entertaining games I've played. I replay the game every year or two as a personal tradition. Some day I'll force my kids to play it. [1]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rj4gsrXUjA4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rj4gsrXUjA4

pavel_lishin 14y ago

> growing up in Russia, using DOS, we were all gung-ho about using Norton Commander and its clones One of my earliest memories is my grandmother teaching me "нц" (nc, apparently the Norton Commander binary) so I could navigate my way to Tetris. (Yes, we're that stereotypical.)

bad_user 14y ago

My first computer had DOS 6.22 and Windows for Workgroups 3.11 on it. I was a Norton Commander user, however I do not have such fond memories of it. Yes it was more efficient than navigating and doing stuff at the raw command line, but that's only because the command-line in DOS and Windows completely sucks in all ways imaginable. Nowadays my command-line only feels limiting whenever I want thumbnails on my files ... like when searching for a PDF, or rearranging my photos folder. In such instances NC would be useless anyway.

pjmlp 14y ago

> Oh man, this tugs on all sorts of sentimental DOS strings. Especially that first phrase about people under 30 not knowing what DOS is. Not only that, youth generation seems not able to separate the distintion between programming languages and their implementations. They all think a strong type language (a la Pascal/Ada) with GC needs can only exist in a VM, dynamic languages (a la Lisp) cannot be compiled to native code or C like languages are always compiled to native code. I tend to think we were able to grasp these subjects much better.

derleth 14y ago
> Not only that, youth generation seems not able to separate the distintion between programming languages and their implementations. To be fair, this has always been true. Look at the old idea "Lisp is Slow", which is literally nonsense once you gain the ability to separate language from implementation.

thristian 14y ago

I was a Norton Commander fan back in the days of DOS, and so when I moved to Linux, I've always had a soft-spot for Midnight Commander... just, you know, not enough to actually use it for anything. It's always puzzled me that Norton Commander was so indispensable for DOS, but Midnight Commander is not so useful under Linux. I think the reason is just that the file-management I do these days is very different from what I needed to do under DOS; I don't have to copy files around to or from floppies to transfer them, nor do I have to shuffle files around from one partition to another to maintain enough disk space. I don't even have to navigate between all the different directories where my apps are installed, because in Linux they're all on my $PATH. Using MC, I really miss bash's tab-completion (Esc-Tab completion isn't the same) although ^S incremental search helps. The NC copy/move/rename dialogs are really designed around the MS-DOS semantics of filename globbing (under DOS, you can say "copy .doc .bak" to make a backup of every document, but "cp .doc .bak" does something very different in Linux), so coping/moving/renaming files in Midnight Commander feels weird. I dunno, I want to like Midnight Commander, but I just think it's a brilliantly-designed user-interface for solving problems that don't exist, or don't exist in the same form, as they did in MS-DOS.

dredmorbius 14y ago
As someone who dislikes GUI file navigators, the two uses I find for MC are as a file archive explorer and for remote file operations. MC will open tarballs of various compression variants, ar archives, etc., and in particular, RPM and DEB files). Want to dig out something without expanding and digging through the archive? Use MC. Similarly, you can access remote systems (via ssh) as if they were local, though I'll more often use lftp's fish:// protocol. Or lately, sshfs. Which I suppose more or less makes your point that under Linux these are mostly solved problems.