First things first. I think that this is just an awesome program. I first used it many years ago when it was still called Windows Commander. I remember buying 5 licenses at the company I worked for and after leaving them I have been lost without it. I have tried all the various free alternatives and nothing else comes close.
It hasn't been an major issue as I have been primarily a linux user for the last 3 years, but I still miss it. I recently took a look at the latest version and its even better than I remembered.
For those of you who have never seen Norton Commander style fiilemanagers, they work on a 2 pane system where one pane is the source and one is the target. You perform operations on files using this manner instead of the Explorer / Nautilus convention of a tree view + icon / list view.
Some of the features that blew me away include:
the addition of tabs to the panes
background copy
multi rename tool
queuing copy operations
sensible keyboard shortcuts / easy to use without a mouse
There's tons of other functionality under the hood that one takes for granted in a file manager which I won't bother mentioning, but the above are the things that standout.
On the linux side. we have a number of choices including
bsc
gnome-commander
krusader
mc
konqueror (configure 2 pane view)
As usual they all have similar functionality in terms of overall "commander" filemanagers and many share the same function key shortcuts. In terms of feature completeness, the best one appears to Krusader. Again, its a KDE app on my gnome-desktop so time will tell if I will stick with it. Having used TotalCommander recently for the first time in a long while, I would like to see as good a linux client. From my research it seems that TotalCommander works quite well under Linux using Wine.
Regarding the feature list above, the only one that I can't seem to find an equivalent for is "queued copy"
A simple example of where this is useful is if you are doing file operations on a usb drive. Lets say the drive has a file transfer speed of 10000 kb / sec. When you do the first file copy, it will copy at close to the max speed. When you do a second copy at the same time, the 2 copies will probably each slow down to the point that the joint speed of the 2 file copies are slower than the max speed. doing 3 copy operations or a delete operation complicates this further. This is magnified even more with dvd / cd file copy operations. The obvious sign of this is disk thrashing. With file queuing, it allows you to sequentially do these operations ensuring that they happen at max speed. I don' t know how windows users can use explorer to do file copies for precisely this reason. Of course, nobody should use explorer for file operations anyway as its broken by design.
In terms of the task of replacing total commander, I guess I can't conclude it in one evening. I have to live with gnome-commander, bsc and krusader for all my file operations and pick a winner when I've thoroughly gotten used to them and tweaked them thoroughly. Currently on first inspection, Krusader is in a comfortable lead position. Interesting question looms now is should I be using KDE vs Gnome? That's another debate for another day.
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