Peter's Blog

Found a cool feature in the Salamander file manager that I hadn't spotted before. In the box where it shows the path to the current directory (e.g c:\Program Files\Blah\This\That) you can click on any of the directories in that path to go straight to that directory, (e.g. click on Blah to go to the directory Blah).

Kinda exasperated because right-clicking in Windows file manager or Salamander does not give me the option to open any file in VIM. For me this has to include .exe's, .dll's, anything that I might want to open: after all, VIM can view binary files in hex mode.

The VIM setup offers to create something like this but it does not seem to work for me so I've figured out how to hack the registry to do it. A picture is work a 1000 words so:

This gives a context menu entry saying 'Open with VIM' that opens the selected file in VIM.

Using someone else's pc at work and missing Servant Salamander file manager. Windows File explorer is so slow by comparison (I don't like waiting for icons to draw as I don't look at them anyway) and a two-pane file manager makes so much sense (copy files from left to right). It doesn't show a direcory tree but I find I don't miss that.

Looking for a freeware alternative I discovered that the 1.52 version of Salamander is freeware so I've installed that. It looks very basic and is lacking many of the bells and whistles of the 2.5 beta like plugin support for ftp/sftp sites, zip files, toolbar buttons etc but it appears to have the bare essentials:

• it is fast
• it can browse networks

Conclusion: better than Windows Explorer, not as good as the latest version but a bargain at the price.

MUST drill this into my head as it is so nice: / key on numeric keypad opens command shell.

I'm up to day 30 of the 30 day trial and I am still using Servant Salamander so I've registered it. I use it in preference to Windows Explorer now, if only because it boots faster and lists directories instantly, even if they have lots of files in them (e.g. \\Windows\\System32). Windows Explorer seems to spend a long time deciding what pretty icon to show.

Sad to see it's cousin Midnight Command is missing from the list of debian's 17,000 packages offered by dselect. I may be able to find it somewhere but there's nothing like the official package.

Servant Salamander is a File Manager for Windows.

Servant Salamander: coming to rely on this. Pretty much destined to register it. Today I discovered that I can get it to calculate space used in subdirectorys and then send a report of directory names and sizes, sorted by size, to the clipboard. Try doing that with Windows Explorer. I've stopped using filezilla, Salamander is a useful sftp client. Things I do wish it could do:

• copy directly from one sftp site to another. Similarly, since you can browse straight into a zip or tgz file, it would be nice to be able to copy a file from within an archive on one window to other window showing an sftp site. The user interface spoils you, you start thinking these things are possible, you try them and are thwarted.
• create tar.gz files. I have actually learned the incantation for this, I am becoming such a command line junkie:

  tar cvfz blah *
  

  It can do zips and rars and stuff.
• It sometimes goes a bit crazy with the confirmation dialogs, sometimes giving two or three in a row. I don't have faith enough to disable them, combining them into one dialog would be nice (e.g. yes I want to copy, I want to copy it there, I want to overwrite everything).

Thunderbird: since I fixed the exchange server I have been using this instead of outlook and have not looked back. I use an IMAP connection to the Exchange server and it is working just fine. I used to have problems with it when my network connection was flakier (it kept asking me for my password) but since I installed XP on my pc the network has been ok (one of those software decay things on my old Win2k install). I think outlook was tainted by spambayes which was pretty lethargic in moving spam around (to get around outlook's flaky message filtering it does lots of sleeps to keep out of the way). So you go to look at a message and find that spambayes is still in the process of moving it to the junk folder. Thunderbirds integrated bayesian spam filter is working for me. Another thing I like about thunderbird, the flag thing that pops up and goes away again when new mail arrives. The outlook taskbar thing always used to get stuck on, even after deleting new messages, to the extent that I disabled it.

Konfabulator is looking good. The weather widget seems to get updated every few hours and told me I could drive home lunchtime and cycle back to work in the afternoon without risking rain. The various clocks all seem to consume about 3% cpu time with the second hand enabled which goes down to less than 1% without the second hand.

Servant Salamander is becoming more useful every day. I don't miss the trees in explorer, it makes a good sftp client, the Hot Paths are very handy, two pane mode is so good for copying files, it's fast, it hasn't crashed while networking (yet), generally it's looking good.

I've been trying Servant Salamander. It's a file manager, derived from the venerable Norton Commander and indirectly related to Midnight Commander which I sometime use on Linux.

Compared to Windows Explorer the only things it is missing are the directory tree and the lethargy.

Salamander shows two panes showing two directories you can be working on so it's easy to copy files from one to the other. It has plugins to support things like ftp or sftp clients and these can show files on a remote server just as if they were on the local disk. You can even browse through the registry.

It supports lots of keyboard shortcuts. For example, F3 to view a file, F4 to edit it (in VIM of course). It comes with a couple of file viewers that can show Word documents and PDF files fairly quickly, quicker than the native apps would boot.

The plugins support zip files and .tar.gz files incridibly smoothly, you click on file to open it like a directory and carry on browsing through the files and directories within.

The 'Hot Paths' are useful. They are like favorite folder shortcuts. You can set it up so CTRL-1 takes you to your desktop or you just click on a toolbar button to go there.

It's very fast. My main reason for investigating it was because I was tired of waiting for Windows Explorer to boot and get around to list files. Salamander can list a directory with many files such as \windows\System32 much faster than Windows Explorer.

You can set up the options to avoid a couple of windows annoyances:

• Turn off the click to rename thing. Avoid accidently going into renaming files when you mis-click on them. Bang F2 to rename a file instead.
• Set it up to delete without going through the recycle bin by default unless you press shift. You can list file extensions of files that you always want to go into the recycle bin (e.g. Word documents).

It's shareware, $20 which is a bargain. I may well buy it.