--- title: "Why Total Commander?" url: "https://courses.osherove.com/courses/commanding-total-commander/why-total-commander.md" canonical: "https://courses.osherove.com/courses/commanding-total-commander/why-total-commander/" tags: [] author: "Roy Osherove" description: "Lesson 1 of 15 in Commanding Total Commander (Introduction), 4:30. Free video by Roy Osherove." usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)." license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" --- # Why Total Commander? 1. [Courses](https://courses.osherove.com/#courses) 2. [Commanding Total Commander](https://courses.osherove.com/courses/commanding-total-commander/) 3. Introduction Lesson 1 of 15 Duration: 4:30 [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kphz_JnaJVE) ## In this lesson Roy Osherove explains why he has used Total Commander on Windows for over 12 years: it is a mature, fully keyboard-friendly file manager with its origins in Norton Commander, with dozens of official plugins for things such as ISO and zip files and FTP, and thousands of unofficial ones. He compares it to Vim or Emacs because it is very extensible, and notes that it can be tried for a long time in shareware mode before paying for it, which he did. He mentions other file managers he tried, such as Salamander and Directory Opus, and warns that once you learn one of these tools it is hard to move to another, and that many of them look nicer than Total Commander. ## Transcript 721 words [\[00:16\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kphz_JnaJVE&t=16s) Hello everybody and welcome to the course about total commander called commanding total commander with me Roy Osherove your host. If you want to find out more about my courses just go to courses.osherove.com. If you want to find out more about the books that I wrote about unit testing or team leadership or beautiful builds, please go to osherove.com. Now, here's the thing. When I did all those books, especially when I work in a technical way, and I work on Windows machines, Total Commander is one of the tools that I really, really like using and I've been personally using it probably from for over 12 years. [\[00:50\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kphz_JnaJVE&t=50s) Its origins were were are in Norton Commander. If you've heard of that, maybe you actually used it. Maybe you wish you could have used it again. Maybe you've heard of it and you thought all those people are crazy that they were using something that looks this horrible. Well, the good news is that Total Commander looks almost as horrible as Norton Commander. But it's also very, very useful. It is a very mature file manager in that it has a bunch of options. [\[01:20\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kphz_JnaJVE&t=80s) It's fully keyboard friendly and a bunch of abilities that are just built in that you cannot do easily with Windows Explorer. And there are dozens of official plugins for a lot of the extra abilities you would want to such as browsing ISO files and zip files etc. And FTP. And there are thousands of unofficial plugins and there are a few probably more than a dozen probably a couple dozen of unofficial releases of Total Commander by different groups with built-in [\[01:53\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kphz_JnaJVE&t=113s) Plugins etc. The way I think about Total Commander is it's kind of like the Vim or VI or Emacs of file managers for Windows because it's very very extensible. You can easily create your own custom stuff for it. And it allows a lot of built-in functionality without getting a lot of external tools otherwise. Now, the nice thing is, you can try it for a long time just using shareware mode. You're just going to get an a screen, but you can try it and only when you really like it you can you actually pay for it. [\[02:27\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kphz_JnaJVE&t=147s) And I did pay for it and I think it's just like 50 bucks or something. It's very very affordable and I highly recommend it. There are a bunch of other file managers out there like form manager, XYplorer. I've personally tried except XYplorer all of the tools mentioned here. A couple of years ago when I was working in a different company I had a competition with one of my fellow programmers. We would try Salamander and Directory Opus etc. [\[03:00\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kphz_JnaJVE&t=180s) And we kept trying to outsmart each other with the shortcuts and the and and the various features that each tool could do that the other tool couldn't. And I have to say Total Commander is the only one that grew on me. But per perhaps it's because when you get used to a tool so much it becomes almost a part of you and it's very hard to grow into a different tool. So, the good news is that if you haven't tried Total Commander yet and you're not used to it, you could try all of the other things before using Total Commander, you might like them even more than you would have liked Total Commander. [\[03:37\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kphz_JnaJVE&t=217s) The problem is that once you've learned one of these tools, it's very hard to move to a different one because you're used to all the shortcuts and sometimes things are very, very different. So that's my only warning to you. A lot of the other tools are just much nicer looking than Total Commander as well. So, that would be also a warning or maybe it's a good sign. I do find that when someone spends too much time on how something looks versus what it does, it might be a bad sign. [\[04:08\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kphz_JnaJVE&t=248s) However, those tools do do a lot of stuff. But if you're a command line person like me, that's actually not much of a concern anyway. you're used to working with kind of ugly screens, etc. So, let's get started just with getting started with the Total Commander and installing things. [Next lesson A Dual Pane State of Mind](https://courses.osherove.com/courses/commanding-total-commander/a-dual-pane-state-of-mind/) --- ## About the author **Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery. ### Sites - [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership. - [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts. - [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin. - [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model. - [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps. - [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes). ### Social - X: https://x.com/royosherove - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/ ### Contact - Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7 ### License Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/