When we first heard the name "Total Commander" we thought it might be a character on the Sci-Fi channel's new reality show Who Wants to be a Superhero? It turns out that Total Commander isn't some middle-aged guy in tights, but rather a file manager utility designed to take the place of Windows Explorer.
Total Commander harkens back to the early days of Windows (or the heyday of DOS) when there were many third-party file managers available and everyone seemed to have a favorite. Of course, Windows Explorer eventually became dominant, and while it is competent, Explorer's not particularly powerful nor does it afford users much flexibility in performing file operations.
In contrast, we found Total Commander to be a fairly powerful file management utility with a few truly handy features. On the other hand, its usefulness is marred by an unconventional and extremely dated user interface that will likely turn off many users.
An Interface from Yesteryear
Perhaps the first sign of what we were in for with respect to Total Commander's UI was when we installed the program and saw that its program icon was a 1.44 MB floppy disk. Indeed, Total Commander has a very "Windows for Workgroups" look-and-feel that's reminiscent of the time when 3.5-inch floppies were in fact the dominant method of file transfer.
One positive aspect of Total Commander's UI is its two-pane layout, which lets you copy or move between folders without multiple open windows. We also like how Total Commander displays compressed files as subdirectories, which makes it easy to manipulate one or more individual files inside an archive. (You can also compress and decompress files in a variety of formats without any external utilities.)
Our overall impressions of the interface, however, are mostly negative. We could probably live with a dated appearance but perhaps not surprisingly Total Commander seems to avoid following any of the modern tenets of interface design.
For starters, Total Commander uses unorthodox menu headings and toolbar icons that don't give much hint as to what they do (fortunately, the latter do offer tooltips). But what's worse is that you can't interact with the program in the way that most experienced Windows users are accustomed to. For example, to select a file, instead of simply clicking it you must right-click it. If you want to call up a context menu for an item, you need to hold the mouse button down for a second, which is awkward.
Another irksome characteristic is that unlike Windows Explorer (or most third-party file managers, for that manner), Total Commander doesn't offer easy access to special Windows folders like Desktop and My Documents via the disk hierarchy. You can still access these folders, but you must do so through a menu bar option (in the case of Desktop) or else drill down through the logged-in users Documents and Settings folder to get to them, and both options are highly inconvenient to say the least.
To help you get the hang of the program's vagaries, the Total Commander Web site offers a tutorial that offers step-by-step instructions for — along with an animation of — many common tasks. It helps, but we'd argue that a utility like a file manager should be intuitive enough to not require a tutorial in the first place. (There's also a fairly detailed help file provided.) Keyboard jocks will appreciate the fact that you can perform many operations in Total Commander via countless keystroke combinations — of course, the catch is that you have to learn them first.
