Review: RedShift Commander
Score:
45%
Version Reviewed: 1.0
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Have you ever noticed how computer manufacturers are taking more and more trouble to shield you from the true nature of computing? Back in the old days, your entire user interface was something like this...
Fig 1: When Computers Did What They Were Told
Nowadays, all you young uns with your graphical interfaces, pointing devices, wysiwyg environments think you have problems when you can only get 127K/sec from a 128K/sec line, but you've never woken up in a sweat over R: Tape Loading Error; 0,1, have you?
The PC DOS environment was one of the most popular home Operating Systems for its time, and while mainly people were happy staying with the command link prompt, one man (Peter Norton) developed Norton Commander. This app provided a split level view of two directories at once, quick access to popular functions (like Copy and Move) with the Function Keys, and quite a bit more. It's not surprising that there are a whole load of system admins who'll still carry a copy of NC (Norton Commander) around in their "box to fix idiot's mistakes."
And now Redshift have produced an almost perfect copy.
Lets Look Through The... Left Window
 There are more copies of Norton Commander in circulation than the number of bags of Werthers Originals bought by all the Pensioners in the United Kingdom in 1987. |
It looks a dream, and I have to say that once it was installed and opened, I was instantly comfortable. Everything looked right, from the split screen view, to the welcome addition of four listed command on the side buttons (although the bottom button is 'more buttons' not 'close.'
The speed is, frankly astonishing. If you're one of these people who have hundreds of jpg pictures on you MMC card for, ahem, executive stress relief, then you'll know how slow the built in File Manager can be when parsing all the files. RC doesn't seem to notice, and while there is a tiny update delay, it's barely enough time to blink.
The overall impression reminds of the HP 200lx - which, for those who don't know, was Hewlett Packard's last halfway decent PDA, running DOS 5.0 on a CGA mono screen. 80 characters mono-spaced across the screen, fixed fonts, use of bold and invert for menus and hot-keys. Nothing's been changed.
It's Too Perfect
And that's the problem. Not only is RC just as you remember it, it is exactly like you remember it. And woe betitde you if you don't remember the old hot keys.
That's right - the old hot-keys. Because Redshift haven't updated to take into account the numerous standard things that even a basic VAT Calculator must follow on the Communicator.
For example, in the menu system, the far left menu is normally a task list menu that allows you to jump to another app. It's not there in RC, it's the (L)eft menu for the left menu pane. If I hit delete, i expect t delete the file, not list it's properties (that's ctrl-p). And the biggest problem? Ctrl-C isn't 'copy file,' it's 'Change Drive.'
It's like that scene in "The Witches" by Roald Dahl, where the boy who loves chocolate is given all the chocolate he wants (five bars!) and gets magiked into a mouse. Much as I want to have a portable DOS box, this is the 21st Century, and the computer keys hard-wired into my brain meant that, much as I want to love RC, it just drives me to frustration. I can't cope with all the error messages and having to think what I want to press next. Grrr...
Summing Up
I really wanted to love RC - and so did my wife, who has fond memories of Eddie XT, his 'massive' 10mb hard drive and 8mhz processor. And if RedShift had an option marked 'Use Communicator Hotkeys' so it could be used intuitively, then it would top the 75% mark. At the moment? It's an interesting diversion, raises eyebrows, but not much else... Which is a shame because the fluidity and speed (especially on a directory with 200+ files on a 128MB card) is exactly what File Manager isn't.
Redshift, I promise to re-review this on version 2.0 when you sort out the style guide issues, but for version 1.01...
...45%. Must do better.
Reviewed by Ewan Spence at