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The Orthodox File Manager (OFM) Paradigm

by Dr Nikolai Bezroukov

Light-weight OFM

In a sense, original Norton commander line up to version 3.0 was small, elegantly written masterpieces of C+assember language programming. They were not open source but they have the spirit of simplicity and power typical for top open source applications. So light-weight OFM represent the most interesting part of open source development, projects when you still might be able to understand and modify the source.

We will discuss two such project: deco and ofm.

deco -- the UNIX OFM pioneer

deco is one of the first attempt to create an OFM. It was written by Serge Vakulenko in 1989 (he was at a time in DEMOS one of the firs ISPs and that is reflected in the name - Demos Commander) and as of this writing it is still used and maintained. It definitely has historical value because it's more than 10 years old, which makes it the first OFM for UNIX.

But due to its simplicity and small codebase it has more than historical value.

Although not that powerful deco is lightweight (about 100K tar.gz source archive of version 3.9 versus 350K for MC) and feels faster than MC. As MC gets more bloated that importance of Deco increases.  Here is one email message from DSL Linux minidistribution group that confirms that MC is over the dangerous line (DSL Ideas and Suggestions :: Is mc a must... or any "Commander ...):

I just don't use any file manager, but I saw how passionately Midnight Commander was defended in the RC1 forum. I have a personal taste for text based applications over X only apps, a matter of pragmatism in case X doesn't start for whatever the reason.

At the same time, even as it was assured that MC will be in the next release, there was at least an intent of dropping it in favour of emelFM. Googling around (well, "Aptituding") I found deco, Demos Commander.

My question is: is it just a matter of having a text based file manager whatever it is, or is it that MC is badly needed for unique features not reproducible or attainable even in other "Commander" clones?

If we are going to need a text-based file manager (which I will because I break things all the time  :- ) why not just leave MC and emelfm alone? Is deco smaller? I think it's better to stick with stuff we know because that makes life easier for newbs like me. I had never used Linux in my life until I installed DSL a month ago. Have mercy on us!   

Yeah, deco seems significantly smaller (twentyfold smaller?).

But I don't know to what extent mc 5MB figure have been tuned down in DSL compared to deco 250KB figure. Dependencies seems to put deco in an even more favourable position.

That is why I am asking if 5MB are really needed to do the job a tiny deco seems to do.

As there is a great difference in size, I assume mc is plentiful of features that deco has not, but I don't know what are those or if those would be really missed in DSL.

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I don't know where you got the 5mb figure for mc....it's grossly inaccurate.  I'm not in DSL at the moment to see what the actual size is for DSL's stripped-down version of mc, but when i compiled the most recent version of mc it came out to be less than 500k without the syntax and extfs files (which i know are not a part of DSL's version)

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On the previous DSL version, mc.bin was 432.7KB uncompressed.  Even smaller when compressed into the filesystem.

The latest version also uses GNU configure which makes it easy to port (esp. in comparison to 4 years old version). In other words deco is a kind of VC in UNIX environment -- small, fast flexible, portable and extremely useful for troubleshooting.

IMHO deco still is a valuable tool that is very useful if one does not has a root access to the system and thus cannot install MC (with its libraries) or if one maintains the system but cannot install anything on it (firewall, DNS server, etc). Among advanced features worth mentioning I would like to single out support of preformatted text in internal viewer (manual pages with bold/underline made by backspace-overstrike, etc.).

Deco can be downloaded from SourceForge.net Project Info - Demos Commander.

The Open File Manager is a project by Raphael Bugajewski and is C-written a console-based Unix file manager with a Norton Commander look. Tared/gziped archive of source is 34K. It is really multiplatform and that fact represents huge advantage for system administrators.  The author states the following:

It is based on ncurses, and it is very flexible.

• OFM is fast - yes it really is. Building time just takes a few seconds to minutes and it is as fast as a lightning..
• OFM is flexible - you can use it in an terminal emulation like xterm as well as on the console.
• OFM has bookmarks, just press Ctrl-b on a dir/file and save it into a temporary bookmark folder. So you can have all interesting stuff in just one view :-)
• OFM is licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License [GPL]
• OFM is sexy ;-). Just take a look: [Screenshot 1] || [Screenshot 2] || [Screenshot 3] || [Screenshot 4]

OFM was tested on

• FreeBSD 4.6.2 and 4.7
• Debian stable (woody)
• Slackware 8.1
• MacOS X 10.2.3, 10.3.2 and 10.4.1 (some bugs)
• NetBSD 1.6 - thanks to Stefan Meier
• SuSE Linux 7.2 - thanks to Daniel Rabenau
• SunOS 5.9
• We hope to see your system here, too, so get OFM and tell us

You can get the source of OFM as well as Debian packages from two sites:

• Savannah (OFMs official project site)
• This server (rather slow)