I'm not using either of them Explorers. Not the Windows Ex, not the m$ Internet one, not the vehicle of such name. While there are reasons for each, today it's the first one.
Among other file managers, I played with Geos (or was it Beos?) and a couple of other wrappers around the explorer object, and settled on Ghisler's TotalCmd for the last nine years, and still haven't looked back. Two main differences: there's a generic file viewer, and there's the command line.
Under WE (and most of the wrappers), it's a major (admiral, if you ask me) PITA to look into a file. First, you have to rightclick it and wait for all the WE extensions to load; then see if there's an app which can openwhich is associated with this type of file. Then find out there's none, select Open With, then wait half a forever for the list of available apps to be scoured from remote provinces of your disk.
In some cases, it doesn't even offer the Open With option, but instead forces you to read this*:
Now this is funny. A so-called "operating system" doesn't know how to... open a file? Wow. And after... how many years now, nineteen?... it still doesn't know which program created which file. OK, maybe it doesn't even need to know - the user should know.
Or the user can use The Web Service. There can be only one.
Either way, there's no quick way: if I used the Web service (sorry, the the and the service aren't capitalized, but they think they can always capitalize on web), it would... go somewhere Microsoft, I guess. Never tried. Trying now, it goes to http://shell.windows.com/fileassoc/0409/xml/redir.asp?Ext=pig [the link is dead]. Amazingly, used my normal browser for it, not insisting on that other explorer. And no, it doesn't know jack about .pig files.
Or, selecting from a list will plow your disk for a while to find a list of registered apps (which are registered so they can be found quickly)(the irony of this wasn't registered and can't be found anywhere). Then you can pick one of the programs, if you know what you're doing. BTW, for .pig files, that would be one of the old DOS gaming platforms, was it the one for Duke Nukem, or 4GW or the one for ROTT or for Doom or Dark Forces - well, open and see... oops, you can't open because of the damn circulus vitiosus.
In case you pick a wrong program and you had the "always" checkbox checked, you're out of luck if you don't know the inner logic of the Redmondians. Because if you try to rightclick and fiddle with the properties of the file, you may find that if you want to change the file association(we're all for the idea of associated files - every file should be an associate! No, an associeté!)(can I become a member of that association?) it may lead to a read-only dialogue, which is about as frustrating as the whole WE. I mean, the button says "CHANGE", for world's name, and when you click it you get to change nothing?!
All this fuss, and I only wanted to see what's in this file. It's actually a text file someone renamed. But the whole of Redmond couldn't figure it out - well, Ghisler did. In Total Commander I just press F3 (imagine, a single keypress) or click the button on its bottom row ("F3 View"), and I get his lister.exe showing the file. It takes its best guess as to the format of the file, so if it's an image it may try to show it; if it's a mp3 or avi it may play it. For most of the rest, it will display it as text, no matter what it is. So you get some gibberish, but you aren't stupid, you know there are unprintable characters, and among them there may be printables too. You scroll and find some text which makes sense to you. Maybe it's the MZ in the beginning, the signature of DOS/Win executable, or a PK (a zip), or JFIF within the first 10 bytes (a JPG), or %PDF - guess what this is. And if lister guessed wrong, you can always tell it to look at it some other way - as text, as Unicode text, as a webpage, as a RTF, as hex, as text+hex, in OEM or ANSI codepage...
Which is why I still don't understand programmers who ask questions like "how does one open a .dat file"? AAaaaarrrrgh! Look into it, open it low-level, and extract what you can or just call it a night.
But which is not the pretext I had for writing this. The command line... which is where you can pass parameters to whatever you're running. In TotalCmd, it's fairly simple: your command line is a simple long textbox with MRU history, and you can type the name or command or just highlight it in the file list above and ctrl+enter to copy it (ctrl+shift+enter to copy full pathname) into the command line, where you can then type extra parameters and you're done.
At times I have to use machines where I can't have TC. The remaining non-whites in my beard may soon give up because of that. How do you run a command or executable with parameters? In Windowses, that is. In TOS on the atarist, it was simple - the executable was a .ttp file, where tp meant "takes parameters", and it would prompt you to enter them before actually running.
In DOS, it was sort of simple, but you had to know where you run it. Your exe may have found files it needed on the wrong place on the disk, depending on your path, or may not find them at all. The systems having grown too big for this kind of logic - you aren't running just a dozen of apps so that all their directories can be part of the global path (and even back then when this was done, it wasn't nice). So you need to know where to run the app, or to have an app which can find its pieces (by having the locations registered in the, ahem, registry or in files in its home directory), or which doesn't need any pieces and can work anywhere.
With TC this is not a problem - at any time you know where you are. You can run the app from the left window on a file (and in the location of) the right window by stating its full path and running it with right window active - that's where you are.
Without TC? Only one solution I know of: DOS prompt. Which is your command line sans steroids. You have to navigate to where you want it to run (or, using TC, run CMD where you want it :), type the name of the executable, type the parameters and then wait for the app to run its course, because it will steal the focus from your DOS window and you may not be able to close it until the app exits.
I've heard the "start button, run, type the name of your app and any parameters". Works if your app is on the DOS path, or if you type (or paste) the full path to it, so the run command will find it and run it, and if your app doesn't mind being launched from your "document and settings" folder every time. Because there's no way to tell it where to start.
I have a dozen other reasons for not using WE at all (not even to display the desktop - my shell is bbLean). This much for today.
And, reposting this, I checked what it would take to run an app which takes parameters today, in 2026, under Windows 11. Got the page on „m$ Learn“ (what's a learn? Or, if it's a verb, I guess it would be in imperative mode, thus futile - m$ never will). To just detect whether an app needs parameters, there's a 13 point manual procedure (begins with 'install'), ends with „Record the parameter value for future use.“ And that's just the top 10% of the text, it gets uglier in the rest.
Worked on translation today and talked a lot with that girl with italian name (David's mistress of sorts), I even had her load the latest version, adjusted her password (she forgot hers, I thought I'd have to ping Jan for that but then discovered I had the rights to do it myself). Some dll and fll files may be locked while installing, and some of them we don't really need anymore, they were workarounds for old Windows shit or functions missing in fox, so reconfiguring the launcher too. The nice thing with the launcher is that it copies the Feds exe to a local directory, so the original exe on the server is not used (and thus not locked) by anybody, so we can install new one at any time. And running it locally makes it so much faster, disk is still faster than the cable (plus disk on the server).
Laura, of course, screams again something about yet another urgent fix for SFBC.
Suez is running a conversion from dbfs to SQL on his laptop, in a hotel lobby, it's taking ages. He had a pizza and a beer and it was still running. With four years of data to convert, Norman's estimate is four hours.
Later sat with Laura over a shared session to do something somewhere. The usual shit, she in Saskachewan, me in Virginia, connecting through a server in Netherlands to a clinic's server in... who knows where, UK, Ireland, Belgium.
Twentieth. Dad reports that the cabbie asked about me. Sure, a guy from VIII2, small is the town. From my reply, „this morning dawned clear, I sent Lena off to a weekend in Yogaville (a training in some hotel near A-burg, part of that yoga trainer course), and it was clear, not a wee cloud. Now in the last hour and a half they flew by a few times, seeded the sky and it's cloudy now. There's moisture in the air quite a lot, and whatever they spread will be seed to condensate around. And they spread all kinds of stuff, in the labs which have the guts and balls to examine the sediment they say they found mostly barium, and various junk - tranquilizers etc. Whatever is ground finely enough and tossed, will condensate the moisture on itself. These differ from regular airplane contrails by the latter dispersing in a minute or two.
And why are they doing it, they don't say. They just do and play dumb. Some have taken pictures, it's nato's planes, white, without markings. Dennis Kučinić, a guvernor in one of the states (and the only honest candidate on last year's elections, which is why he vanished as early as during the warm-up for the main race), filed a bill whereby this would be banned - and it wasn't even put on the agenda. And I see from the photographs that they're doing it all over the world. Folks mostly don't notice at all.“
Then on ppp I get labeled as a conspirationista (new word!), because these long trails, which smear across the sky, are a natural phenomenon. Then I notice it was always a natural phenomenon in the last fisix years, absent from older photos and older movies. And the Russians will suffer mass extinction, there's none of that there (checked on Panoramio - can't fake photos from thousands of contributors), who knows what're they doing there, this is not natural.
Ender has two motorbikes :). He bought one from the proceeds from the resale of a third bike, and the one he got for free he's now polishing to sell.
And the job he had, he quit. It was not just that the salary was miserable - mere 7$ an hour, which one gets for flipping hamburgers, it's that he worked just nine hours a week (of the promised thirty), and that these nine were often on a saturday when he has Eleese. The boss is not in business because he likes to do it, or because he wans to run a successful shop, but to squeeze as much money as fast as possible, while behaving like Kir Janja - doesn't matter how much damage I make, as long as I avoid spending.
She's cooking soap today again, but wants to mix in some algae so it'll be a weight reducer. She always mixes in something - there's cinnamon in the last batch. She made one by a different recipe too, for laundry. This gets grated, on a kitchen grater, and dried, then dissolved with something (I think borax and some washing soda, something with potassium) and you get a washing machine detergent. The commercially available detergents may smell better to some (not to me, I can't breathe while standing in that aisle in a grocery, too strong), but this washes better. The pants used to come out somewhat grayish, the cotton on the jeans never shone properly where they wore out, it was all pale smear. Nothing without homemade.
And we got to like the chutney. It's an indian recipe, read about it from Rushdie, but didn't know what it was. It's about halfway between pekmez, sauce and pickles. We took two or three kinds in that korean-latin grocery, but they didn't restock and we ran out, the bottles were as if for ketchup, small. So she pulled out the indian cookbook, found a recipe, we bought two mangoes and she cooked it up. A beauty - mango pekmez, with some special vinegar (was it the blackberry or apple, wouldn't know now), spiced up with a whole small spoon** of ground paprika plus some crushed just in case. Got almost a whole jar - or whatever, can't judge because it's emptying too fast.
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* amazingly, seventeen years later the image is still at 4.bp.blogspot.com/_4f1De1zyywQ/Sjk65ADUo6I/AAAAAAAAADU/wIzCmWhdZg0/s1600-h/ - I've made a local copy just in case. Justin Case is my friend.
** american tea spoonlet, about one and a half of our coffee spoonlet
