DOS ain't dead

Hi all,

probably any DOS user knows John Socha's Norton Commander, and most of
you will be familiar with the Volkov Commander by Vsevolod V. Volkov.
Many other clones exist, like Miguel de Icaza's GNU Midnight Commander,
or File Commander by Brian Havard. The latter had been ported to Win32
in 1999, but it is less known than Christian Ghisler's Windows/ Total
Commander or Eugene Roshal's FAR Manager.

Similar to FAR 1.70, File Commander/ Win32 version 2.20 and 2.30 work
fine in DOS/HX 2.17 with HX' environment variable DPMILDR=128 set. The
mentioned versions can be found at
http://silk.apana.org.au/pub/fcw/old/fcw220.zip and
http://silk.apana.org.au/pub/fcw/old/fcw230.zip , respectively.

When starting the FCW.EXE binary in DOS, HX misses some import functions
(DdeInitializeA, DdeConnect, DdeDisconnect, DdeClientTransaction,
DdeCreateStringHandleA, DdeFreeStringHandle and DdeUninitialize), which
had not been on Japheth's agenda in August 2012. Unlike DosWin32 by Iouri
Kharon, HX does not indicate methods to overcome missing import functions.
Iouri has ceased DosWin32's devlopment, but instead recommends using HX.
I had no idea about it's DPMILDR variable, and discovered it merely by
accident on Florian Xaver's great page on HX-compatible Win32 programs,
http://www.xaver.me/drdoswiki/index.php?n=Main.HXDOSwishlists . For
DPMILDR settings, see HXRT217.zip\DOC\DPMILD32.TXT 39412 bytes 2011/05/27.

When comparing File Commander to other clones, Vsevolod V. Volkov stated
"FC is better" (personal mail from 2000/12/27, FAR wasn't mentioned here).
When running FAR 1.70 in DOS/HX, COMMAND.COM's internal commands (SET,
DIR [/S] or ATTRIB [/S]) are unavailable, whereas supported by FCW. Dr
Nikolai Bezroukov discusses differences on his comprehensive Orthodox
File Manager (OFM) site. Bezroukov's review of File Commander is in
http://www.softpanorama.org/OFM/Paradigm/Ch05/file_commander.shtml .

Personally, I often use File Commander's binary comparison of files in
both panels, and it's "Copy command line to clipboard"-feature. There
are many more - feel free to test it.

Regards, Torsten