Back in the days before Windows became the dominant desktop OS, the PC world lacked a standard file manager — there were lots of third-party products available and everyone had their favorite. Ultimately, and due mainly to ubiquity rather than capability, Windows Explorer became the file manager of choice, but there are still third-party utilities available that aim to replace Windows Explorer by providing more powerful file management tools.
One such utility is WindowsNC.net, a utility that alternately stands for Windows Next Commander (or Norton Commander — more on that in a moment), Network Edition. We found that WinNc.net in fact does many things that Windows Explorer doesn't, but it often does them in ways that will leave many users confused.
An Interface Only a Programmer Could Love
When we looked at another file management utility, Total Commander, a while back, our biggest complaint was a convoluted and difficult-to-use interface. WinNc.net's UI layout is better, but it also has several peculiarities that negatively affect its overall usability.
WinNc.net starts with a familiar two-pane layout designed to facilitate the copy or moving of files. You can choose to view file and folder information "old school" — in detail and one folder at a time — or you can use a more contemporary hierarchical view instead. You can also apply a different style to each pane.
Selecting local or network drives (we suppose that's what makes this a "network edition") or special folders like Desktop or My Documents is made easy via dedicated buttons and pull-down menus, and there are large button bars that occupy the top and bottom of the WinNc.net window, putting most file operations within easy reach.
The top button bar can be detached and floated anywhere on the desktop, and most operations can also be activated through keyboard shortcuts. If you're feeling nostalgic for the days of DOS, you can set WinNc.net's interface to "Norton Commander style," which places a permanent command-line prompt just above the lower button bar.
But along with the high degree of customization, there are several aspects of WinNc.net's interface that can be perplexing. For example, at the bottom of each half of drive panes the total capacity and free space of the selected drive is shown, but in addition to numeric values the free space is also displayed graphically in a way that looks almost identical to the progress indicator you'd see when copying, moving, or downloading files.
We eventually got used to it, but on several occasions early on, a glimpse at the free space indicator lead us to believe we had inadvertently initiated a file operation when we actually hadn't.
Another potential source of confusion is the way WinNc.net denotes selected files. When you click on one or more files to select them, instead of indicating this with a highlight bar a la Windows Explorer, the entry text simply changes from the black to blue. This subtle change makes it much harder at a glance to distinguish between files that have been selected and those that haven't.
An additional problem (though not as significant) can be WinNc.net's use of antiquated and inconsistent terminology. Case in point: the utility refers to folders as directories — not an incorrect term to be sure, but also not the one most commonly used by applications. Moreover, while a menu option is called Create Directory, a button bar item used for the same task is labeled "mkdir," in reference to the old DOS command.
