Total Commander (File Manager)

If you haven’t done so already, you may want to start by reading the Preface to the Computing Series: Software as a Force Multiplier, Sections 1-3.

1. Total Commander: a programmable, extensible, feature-rich two-panel orthodox file manager

Total Commander (TC) is more than just a two-panel orthodox file manager for Windows. It is a swiss army knife of computing utilities and is the first piece of software that I install on any Windows computer on which I’m working.¹ Total Commander, used well, is a force multiplier.
Tenets of the TC approach:

1. Two-panes is the natural way to think about most file and directory operations (source panel, destination panel).
2. Keys beats mouse for speed and accuracy. Make the keyboard use easy. List of keyboard shortcuts and description of features
3. A computing platform should be fully extensibility. Adding your own tools should be easy.
4. Portability secures your investment: grab your totalcmd folder, copy to a new computer, and everything should work seamlessly.

I’ve been using TC continuously since 2001. Over the years, I’ve put together a Total Commander Expansion Pack (lite and full) for the TC platform that conforms to the tenets and further extends TC platform’s capabilities with tools I have found valuable. Both are pre-configured downloads to allow unpack and start using with minimum fuss (I use them when switching computers). Feel free to download and give them a try. Feedback or questions welcomed in the comments.

---

2. Total Commander – Built-in Core Capabilities

The goal of TC is to allow the user to perform a large number of file manipulation actions quickly and efficiently, without having to resort to the mouse. For proficient users, this keyboard orientation delivers unmatched efficiency. See Appendix A for TC’s history and its author Christian Ghisler.

• Zip/Unzip packer/unpacker
• FTP client,
• Full Regex desktop search, fast with Everything
• Full-featured file difference comparator
• Fine-grained directory synchronization
• Built-in command line
• Batch file processing capability
• Efficient background bulk file transfer move/copy with rules for handling auto-detected defects (e.g. filenames longer than 255 characters), rules for managing duplicates (skip, overwrite, or rename with regex extension), or manual approval), and cleverness in retaining all exceptions till the end while processing the rest.
• Efficient Multi-file renaming
• Quick viewer for files
• An extensive ecosystem of plugins provide hundreds of add-on capabilities providing e.g.
  • viewers for Word documents and Excel spreadsheets (without loading Word or Excel)
  • batch converting high-res images to low-res for quick uploading or use in documents.
  • easy management/cleanup of unwanted startup files
  • easy kill of runaway processes (avoiding the “wait for task manager to start” situation)
  • easy setting of environment variables
• Any third party tool that isn’t part of Total Commander can be readily attached using TC’s fully configurable button bar and menu systems. This means you can consolidate your software toolkit into an single efficient, platform, and reduce the number of standalone “screwdriver utilities” required (see table 4).

Total Commander’s core features, in 12 screens.

---

3. Total Commander – Capabilities through Extension

The expansion pack for TC includes the following additional softwares, configured for tight integration with TC. Furthermore, TC has been configured for maximum efficiency. Everything is fully portable, no changes to registry or windows, deleting the directory removes all changes cleanly.

The Full TC Expansion pack
As of Jan 1st, 2024, it contains:

Primary Capabilities
1. Total Commander (v11.2) (two-panel file manager and much more)
2. Notepad++ (v7.8.6) (programmer’s text editor. Launch with F4 on any text file.)
3. Calcute (calculator) (Discreet highly capable calculator. Launched with F12. See Calcute footnote below for command syntax.)
4. LightScreen (screengrabber) (take a screengrab of any selected rectangle with Ctrl+10.)
5. Ultimate Calendar (Launch with F11.)
6. DeskPins (toggle any window to remain on top with Ctrl+12)
7. Everything (ultra fast desktop search engine tightly integrated with TC. Launch with Alt+F7.)
8. AutoHotKey (versatile keyboard remapper. Loads with Total Commander. Configure here: c:\totalcmd\ToolboxAutomation\AutoHotkey\AutoHotkey.ahk )
9. IrfanView (v4.54) (fast, lightweight, universal image viewer with batch transformation, resizing, and effects)
10. MPC-HC (versatile, lightweight media player)
11. PDF Xchng Viewer (flexible, powerful, lightweight PDF viewer).
12. Sound file speedup while maintaining pitch – Total Commander has included since v10.0 beta 8 sound processing DLLs from SoundTouch Audio in the folder Filter64. These allow the Lister (F3) to play music files and to change the tempo without impacting pitch. Neat stuff for musicians, singers, and DJs. For a fuller-fledged player, see TC Player.

    Utilities

13. WinAero ElevatedShortcut (Utility. Removes unwanted User Access Control (UAC) warnings. Included with TC.)
14. ImageCompare (Utility. Compares two images side by side.)
15. PDF Tools (Utilities for merge, append, extract from PDF)
16. ScreenRuler (Utility.)
17. Imagine (Utility. Rapid viewer)
18. PhotoFiltre (Utility. Used to add text into icons.)
19. IconSushi (Utility. Icon maker. Used to make images into icons.)
20. Hex Calculator (Utility. What it says on the tin)
21. Juju Edit (Utility. Editor for large text files.)
22. HxD Editor (Capability. Efficient binary editor for files >4GB)
23. SeaMonkey (Capability. HTML editor)
24. TeX (Capability. TeXnicCentre user interface on MikTeX engine – MiKTex needs to be installed separately – large file.)
25. ps2pdf conversion (Utility)
26. png2eps conversion (Utility)
27. DjVu viewer (Utility)
28. DjVu to PDF converter(Utility)
29. GeoGebra (Capability)
30. AMPL (Capability. Mathematical optimization package)
31. InstallForge (install maker)
32. DigitalWorks (Capability. Simulator for digital electronics design)
33. RealTerm (Utility. Best in class serial comms terminal)
34. vDosPlus (Capability. DOS emulator for non-games software)
35. DOSBox (DOS emulator for games software)
36. F-PC Forth (v3.6) (Capability. Runs in vDosPlus)
37. F-PC Forth (v3.6) (Capability. Load into DOSBox for sound fidelity)
38. GForth (v0.7.0) (Capability. Runs in Windows natively)
39. TCC interpreter (Capability. Runs C programs interactively)
40. PEBrowse (Capability.)
41. Ruby (v1.9, 2.6, 3.3) (Capability. Dynamic programming language)
42. irb (Ruby Interactive Interpreter)
43. Python (v3.12) (Capability. Dynamic programming language)
44. TurtleLogo Forth (Example of Graphic programming in Forth/F-PC)
45. Arduino ATtiny codes (Capability to use ATtiny chips with Arduino)
46. GraphViz lite (Capability. Network diagramming without the pfaff)
47. NASM (Capability. Assembly language programming)
48. Perl (Capability. Language processing)
49. TinyCAD (Capability. Layout)

Larger programs integrated with TC but not included (you will have to install these yourself) (combined total 3.9GB)

1. Firefox Portable (v121.0) (browser)
2. R Statistical Platform (107MB)
3. Octave (900MB)
4. Maxima (660MB)
5. MiKTeX (515MB)
6. FFMPEG (208MB)
7. Arduino (512MB)
8. Python 3.12 (280MB)
9. Ruby 3.3
10. AmForth (21MB)
11. Audacity (25MB)
12. Thunderbird (70MB)
13. Microsoft Core Office Suite: Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook (separate download and license required)

---

4. Deep Dive into Selected Capabilities

In this section we’ll look at some capabilities that take a little bit of explaining to exploit.

4.1 TC Hammer: Using the Windows Shell to iterate an action through all the files in a TC pane

TC Hammer is an iterator integrated into Total Commander. The value is that TC itself allows powerful and granular ways to filter files. TC Hammer then iterates over the files.

Example: Suppose you had a folder with 1000 images and you wanted to resize just Img800 to Img900.
As long as you have a program that can do the job on one file, you can you TC Hammer to efficiently loop through all files or the restricted files. You would use TC to make the selection, then Hammer simply iterates.

In Total Commander:
TC HAMMER processes all files in a directory with a specified program using the following command.
cmd=cmd
params=/Q /c “pushd “%P” & for %%f in (“%T”\*) do “%P%N” %%f & pause”
Instructions: TC HAMMER: (ALL files in Target pane get processed with program selected in Source pane. Outputs to srcdir.)

Explanation:

• cmd is windows shell. See cmd /? for information on the various options.
• /Q means do in quiet mode, i.e. don’t ask for confirmation for e.g. delete
• /c means close after completing the command
• “pushd “%P sets cmd’s working directory to the source pane
• for %f in %T do “%P%N” %f This is the core iteration. It says that for every file %f in the target pane %T, process it with the program in the source pane %P%N.
• %P%N is the fully qualified path\filename to be processed
• Note: %% in TC is escaped character for %, and %f is correct within cmd line
• Since you can only put ONE command after do, we get around this by concatenating multiple commands into one command using &.
  In this example, there are two commands, a pushd command and a for loop. The for loop in turn has two commands, the processing %P%N %%F and the pause.

• pause prevents the cmd line window from automatically closing, so we can see what has happened. It can be removed once you’ve tested.

With TC Hammer, you can write batch scripts of various types and complexities and simply pass them to TC Hammer to run on all files files in a folder to generate the output you need.

Without TC Hammer, you would have been mixing the complexities of the processing with the complexities of the shell looping. E.g. this would run ffmpeg to do some image transformations on every image in a given folder.

	for %%f in (%targetdir%\*.%intype%) do %srcdir%\ffmpeg.exe -i %%f -vf scale=-1:480 %targetdir%\%%~nf_small%%~xf

To test the above, you can use the following simple batch script:

@echo off
:: this batch script passes through the input file to the console AND appends to a single file
:: used for testing TC Hammer
:: AKE 2024-01-16---Tue---11:34
echo "Appending..." >> collect.txt
echo "=============" >> collect.txt
set myfile=%1
echo myfile
type %myfile%
type %myfile% >> collect.txt

For every nail there’s a hammer…
The strength of TC is it’s versatility.
Using the hammer concept above, once can readily create modified hammers that take as input the three main types of TC output:

(1) one selected file (%T%M if target pane, %P%N if source pane)
(2) a directory of files (%T if target, %P if source)
(3) a selection of files written to an output file (for a program to loop over)
(4) a selection of files copied to clipboard (for a program using Win32OLE to pull from clipboard)

---

4.2 Create user commands

Setting up a user command
You can create “user commands” for TC in a separate INI file call called usercmd.ini. This can include a) anything that you would run on the command line, b) any application you may run, in any configuration. These user commands can be made into menu items (see Language > WCmd_eng.mnu), buttons on the button bar (see Configure > Button Bar…), and associated with keyboard shortcuts (aka hotkeys) (see Configure > Options… > Misc, or using third party program UltraTC Hotkey Editor).

Examples:

[em_startEverything]
cmd=%COMMANDER_PATH%\plugins\util_everything\Everything.exe -first-instance
button=%COMMANDER_PATH%\plugins\util_everything\Everything.exe
menu=Start Everything (ultra fast desktop search engine)
[em_startLightScreen]
cmd=%COMMANDER_PATH%\Lightscreen\lightscreen.exe
path=%COMMANDER_PATH%\Lightscreen\
button=%COMMANDER_PATH%\Lightscreen\lightscreen.exe
menu=Start Lightscreen (Ctrl+F10 to activate)
[em_startCalcute]
cmd=%COMMANDER_PATH%\calcute\Calcute.exe
path=%COMMANDER_PATH%\Calcute\
button=%COMMANDER_PATH%\calcute\Calcute.exe
menu=Calcute (Ctrl+F12)
[em_cd]
cmd=cd
param=?
menu=Browse to Path


Notes:

• %COMMANDER_PATH% refers to where totalcmd.exe is installed, typically c:\totalcmd\

---

4.3 Auto start programs when TC launches.
No more need to configure Windows to autostart applications (which is non-portable between workstations). Configure once in TC and add to any computer where you use TC. Uses AutoRun plugin.

Setting up AutoRun in Total Commander
The AutoRun plugin enables TC to launch programs or commands (including user-provided commands), when the TC app launches. This ensures that key supporting applications are always available alongside TC (e.g. Everything for fast desktop search, Ultimate Calendar, Calcute, Deskpins, and AutoHotkey).

Add your command into the plugins/WDX/AutoRun.CFG file like so:

# ############# EXECUTE DURING TC OPENING ###############
# Calls a Windows shell command
# ShellExec notepad
CommandExec em_startEverything
CommandExec em_startAutoHotKey
CommandExec em_startLightscreen
CommandExec em_startCalcute
CommandExec em_startDeskPins
CommandExec em_startCalendar


For fresh installation only
If you are installing AutoRun fresh, you will need to do the following steps. (If you are using the TC Expansion pack, this is already done for you.)
In order to load plugin at Total Commander start, you should create the fictitious color scheme:

1. On the “Color” page press “Define colors by file type…” button.
2. In the “Define colors by file type” dialog set cursor in any place in the list, and press “Add…” button.
3. Press “Define…” button.
4. In the “Define selection” dialog move to “Plugins” tab.
5. Select in “Plugin” dropdown list “autorun”.
6. Select in “Property” dropdown list “Autorun” (there will not be more properties).
7. Select in “OP” dropdown list “=” and set in following field any integer, for example 1.
8. Press “Save” button, give the template some name , for example “Autorun”.
9. Next, repeatedly press OK button in all dialogs until options dialog will be closed.
10. Restart TC.
11. If you have many color schemes, it’s recommended to move Autorun scheme to the top of list, else it can not run sometimes

---

1. 4.4. Image Resizing / Conversion in Batch mode. No more need to use bloated photo-editing programs to do this. Select files in TC in the usual way, and use the Graphic Converter plugin (Alt+F5), with extensive configuration options. Example: Creating Animations from Stills (For professional use-cases, i.e. a photographer with 1000s of images in 100s of folders, I’ve written a standalone program using Ruby and FFMpeg that recursively runs through all photos in any set of nested directories and resizes them into an appropriately named subdirectory. If you’re interested, drop me a note in the Comments below.)
2. 4.5 Create AVI animations from still images Select files in TC in the usual way, and use the AVI plugin (Alt+F5), with extensive configuration options (frame per second, compression, etc.). Example: Creating Animations from Stills
3. 4.6 Lightning-Fast Desktop Search with Everything Integration (Alt+F7, then ed: or ev: plus search string). No more inefficient Windows searching with their slow Indexing service. TC has powerful file search capalities including Text & RegEx search. With Everything integration via IPC (inter-process communication), searching for that elusive file in a 200GB harddrive takes less than 1 second! Read how to set this up in the Everything article .
4. 4.7 Lightning-Fast Folder sizing with Everything (ALT-SHIFT-ENTER) No more waiting for minutes for directory sizes to compute, or wondering which folder is the culprit for consuming too much hard disk space. Display all of them in less than 1 second with Everything integration
5. 4.8 Create your own keyboard shortcuts to launch programs from within TC No more need to use AutoHotKey for simple tasks. Use TC’s built-in AutoHotKey editor in Configure > (or just enter shortcuts into [Shortcuts] section of wincmd.ini. Custom user commands can be created in usercmd.ini. All TC commands can be assigned hotkeys (see Configuration > Misc. > Hotkeys and Command Browser).
6. 4.9 Integrate Calendar with Ultimate Calendar (free). No more wasting time with the limited clock view. I have it set to Ctrl+F9.
7. 4.10 Integrate Lightscreen screenshot grabber (free). I have it set to auto-launch with TC.
8. 4.11 Integrate Notepad++ with TC’s automatic editor launcher (F4).
9. 4.12 Integrate IrfanView with TC’s automatic lister (F3) and quickviewer (Ctrl+Q).
10. 4.13 Integrate a Discreet Calculator with Calcute (free). No more need to use the clunky windows Calc function, or heavy mathematical software. Calcute makes quick mathematics easy, including a built-in hex and binary calculator (hex’0ff, bin’1011, and 64 to hex). I have it set to launch with F12.²
11. 4.14 Integrate DeskPins. Pin any window easily to stay on top. I have it set to Ctrl+F11.
12. 4.15 Multi-file Renaming built-in capability.
13. 4.16 Rapid Image Browsing with thumbnail view (Alt+F7) & quickviewer (Ctrl-Q) built-in capabilities.
14. 4.17 FTP client built-in (Ctrl+F). See Appendix B, Making FTP connections
15. 4.18 Compare files by content built-in capability.
16. 4.19 Synchronize Directories built-in capability.
17. 4.20 Quicksearch directories built-in capability
18. 4.21 Working Platform, with configurable toolbar buttons
19. 4.22 Total Commander can now be used to access Cloud drives. see video
20. 4.23 Ultra Configurability Almost every aspect of TC is configurable. The TC configuration files have special settings not accessible through the user interface which are quite useful. The descriptions are here for: wincmd.ini, or you can use the standalone help file (F1, search INI file settings). UltraTC Editor makes this even easier by providing user interfaces for tasks such as changing TC hotkey mappings (WINCMD.INI) and TC’s menu text (WCMD_ENG.MNU), amongst others. Separating Platform Configs from Personal Configs by using two INI settings AlternateUserIni= and RedirectSection= 0 (retain in wincmd.ini), 1 (read from alternate user ini), allows separating platform configuration settings from personal or session-specific information (recently used directories, files, search strings, etc.). Use these make your configurations more easily portable/shareable.

---

More:

• Total Commander exists for mobile phones or tablets: Android, Windows, PocketPC, and Blackberry
• WiFi/WLAN transfer of files from Android over TC

---

5. Getting Started with TC

1. First step is to download and install the official TC package available free:
   • Choose 64-bit download (unless you have a strong preference).
   • Download, select RUN, accept for TC to make changes to your system
   • Select English language, No for other languages
   • Install to c:\totalcmd
   • Change INI file location; choose program directory (keeps TC portable by locating wincmd.ini, wx_ftp.ini, ls_plugin.ini together in c:\totalcmd)
   • INSTALL.

   TC installs as shareware whose only limitation is a nag screen at startup. A lifetime license (37 EUR) entitles you to all future upgrades and no limit to installed CPUs (get the license once you find this has saved you hundreds of hours and support Christian Ghisler).

2. Choose from one of two pre-configured zip archives:
   • Lite: totalcmd.zip (225MB zipped/446MB unzipped, 2024-01-17). The Lite version extends and customizes TC with a subset of the Full Version above, and contains 26 useful plugins and 19 utilities. See capabilities list above.
   • Full: totalcmd_full.zip (328MB zipped/639MB unzipped, 2024-01-17). The contents of the full pack add engineering tools (Ruby, Python, Perl, Tiny C, GForth, NASM, DOSBox, Digital Works, TinyCAD, RealTerm Serial, GraphViz, and more). See capabilities list above.

   Installation Instructions (same for both):
   Once the files have downloaded, Open Folder, then right click the file and select Extract All. Type destination c:\ (Don’t worry, this will unpack it into c:\totalcmd since all the files are contained in totalcmd folder.) (Note: TC can’t be running when you unpack it). When prompted by Windows, click OK to REPLACE files. This will copy over all of the customizations and over-write the latest version with an older version. Don’t worry, as soon as you start TC it will prompt you to automatically upgrade to the latest edition (which by the way you downloaded in Step 1, so you have it anyway). When prompted by TC, accept, on the website click Download, install 64-bit. Run, and this time choose “Replace existing Total Commander”. Done! You now have the latest TC extended to give you an even more powerful operating shell for Windows.

   ---

   6. Quicklinks & References

   1. Total Commander Shortcuts Cheat Sheet (PDF)
   2. Systematic visual help file for TC
   3. Total Commander’s key features, in 12 screens.
   4. Wincmd.ini reference list, for all TC configuration settings
   5. TC has an active user community (AKE, B*)
   6. TC has many useful plug-ins: Official plugins(called add-ons) from the TC site, endorsed plugins from TC site, and community submitted plugins from totalcmd.net or the Polish site totalcmd.pl.
   7. Almost every aspect of TC is configurable. The TC configuration files have special settings not accessible through the user interface which are quite useful. The descriptions are here for: wincmd.ini, or you can use the standalone help file (F1, search INI file settings). UltraTC Editor makes this even easier by providing user interfaces for tasks such as changing TC hotkey mappings (WINCMD.INI) and TC’s menu text (WCMD_ENG.MNU), amongst others.
   8. Total Commander change log.
   9. Older Versions archive back to version 1.10 here and to 1.12 here
   10. Guide to Efficient Use of Total Commander by Ilya Gulko, 2000: “An experienced person using Total Commander may seem like a magician to observers.”
   11. Powerful Windows Explorer replacement, by Alex Chitu, 2006: shows why users value TC so highly.
   12. OFM Standard 1999 compares Total Commander against OFM alternatives. The TC article is dated, but has some useful content.
   13. You can delete large size thumbnails file (tcthumbs.idb)after working with images
   14. Portable environment variables: %commander_path%, %commander_exe%, %commander_drive%, %$APPDATA%, %$DESKTOP%, %$PERSONAL% (My Documents), %$PROGRAMS%, %$STARTMENU%, %$FONTS%, %$STARTUP%
   15. If your style is to advertise your geekery, then you can also order TC T-shirts… Style 1 and Style 2
   

   Total Commander: Why Explore when you can Command?

---

Appendix A. Historical Background for TC

• TC was written in 1993 for Windows 3.1 by Swiss programmer Christian Ghisler (b.1969) in Delphi (Borland’s implementation of Pascal) while studying at the University of Bern at age 24. Until about 2010, TC was written in Delphi 2.0 with hand rolled Unicode controls. In 2010, with the demise of Borland’s version and the move to Embarcadero, and with no 64-bit capability on the horizon with Delphi, Ghisler migrated the code to Free Pascal language (Lazarus IDE).
• TC has been in continuous production for 30 years (v1.00 released 25th September 1993, v11.02 released November 2023).
• TC executable is highly stable, and has run on all Windows versions from 3.1 (Windows Commander v1.00), through Windows 95, 98, ME, 2000, XP, 7, Vista, Windows 8, Windows 10, and currently Windows 11 (in 2024).
• TC’s design follows the distinctive orthodox style that first originated with John Socha‘s Norton Commander (NC) in 1986 for DOS (an interesting history is here. Already by 1989, NC was winning computing awards, and created a new category of software (orthodox file manager) which has had dozens of clones for every operating system.
• Ghisler speaks of the early history of TC: “I had bought the program DOS Command Center (DCC), a German shareware for DOS which at the time could already do much more than the original Norton Commander. I wrote Total Commander (then called Windows Commander) initially for myself because I found nothing comparable for Windows. I wrote Total Commander at home in my spare time while I was studying Physics at the University, and initially sales were very low. After I finished my studies, sales have been high enough to make a living.” (Interview with Christian Ghisler, March 2011
• Total Commander’s early history has additional highlights here with the full change log available here.

---

Appendix B. Making an FTP Connection

TC has a built in FTP application (Ctrl+F).
You will need to configure your connections (setups are stored in wx_ftp.ini).
Configuration settings are:

• Session: give it a name – sessions are auto listed alphabetically, so 01* comes before 02*
• Hostname (Port): is the URL for the connection (e.g. www.mathscitech.org)
• Username/Password: enter
• RemoteDir: enter to go to a subdirectory; leave blank to go to root
• Checkbox: Use passive mode for transfers

Note – TC FTP client is not convenient for bulk downloading files from an FTP server (e.g. wordpress website) because for each file it will handshake the server and give credentials. The efficient way to do this is using ZIP or gzip on the server, and then FTP’ing the packed file. This requires using an SSH client (such as TeraTerm or RealTerm), or using web interface provided by the web-hosting service or ISP.

---

For further articles in this series describing software tools I use in my day job as a mathematician in industry and in my spare time, to speed things up, explore, experiment, and build working prototypes fast:

1. Efficient Computing: using Software as a “Force-Multiplier”
2. Total Commander (TC): a powerful two-panel file manager (“why explore when you can command?”)
3. Notepad++ (NPP): a programmer’s text editor.
4. Everything: an ultra-fast desktop search engine.
5. Forth, Lisp, & Ruby; or The power of programming a problem-oriented language to solve your application quickly & reliably

“Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity — it is very much like compound interest.” – Richard Hamming, Applied Mathematician, Bell Labs, USA, You and Your Research

–

---

Endnotes