GS Commander

Anyone who has used a PC this year knows the picture: two blue panels side by side, a highlight bar, and a row of numbered keys along the bottom of the screen. GS Commander brings that way of working to the Apple IIgs. One pane shows one folder, the other pane another; you copy, move and delete from the active pane to the other one, and you never have to drag a window out of the way to do it.

It runs on the GS/OS desktop in 640 mode, so the menus, the mouse and the IIgs fonts are all there. But everything can be done from the keyboard: the arrow keys move the bar, Tab goes to the other pane, Return opens a folder, and Delete goes back up. Typing a letter jumps to the next name that starts with it.

Ten keys

The number keys do the work, and the key bar can be clicked too. Copy, Move and Delete act on the tagged items, or on the one under the bar when nothing is tagged. Folders go with everything in them, and files keep their type, aux type, dates and resource forks. Escape stops a long copy between files.

Move or Rename asks for a name or a path: a plain name renames, a path starting with a colon moves. Compare Panes tags the files that are only in one pane, or in both with another size or date.

The mouse, too

A click puts the bar on an item and a double click opens it; a double click on a pane’s path goes up a folder, all the way to the list of volumes. Apple-click tags an item, Shift-click tags a whole range; the Select menu has all the ways to tag. Press on an item and drag it onto the other pane, or onto a folder in either pane, and it is copied there at once. Hold Option and it is moved instead.

Three looks

Blue is the Norton way, but not the only one. The Panes menu also has Apple IIgs Colors, white panes like the Finder’s with the folders in blue, and MS-DOS Colors, gray on black. Choose IBM PC Font, and the panes, Quick Look and the boxes are drawn in IBM Klone, a IIgs font that looks like the PC’s own. GS Commander remembers your choice for the next time.

Look before you leap

Press Space and Quick Look tells you what the item is (its kind, size, dates and access) and shows what is in it: text, a listing, the names in a folder, or the picture itself. The arrow keys move on to the next file with Quick Look still open, so you can leaf through a disk of unknown files in a minute.

It knows 448 kinds of files by their type and aux type, from CiderPress II's table and the a2infinitum list. BASIC programs come out as listings (Applesoft, Integer and Business BASIC), Merlin and S-C assembler source in columns, and program files as their segments, with the code disassembled as 65816 or 6502 and the Toolbox, GS/OS and ProDOS calls named.

View (3) and Quick Look show pictures on the whole screen until a key is pressed, in every format MegaconvertGS can load, because its loaders are built in. On the Apple side: HiRes, Double HiRes and LoRes; Super Hi-Res as $C1 screens, packed, Apple Preferred, PaintWorks, DreamGrafix and 3200 colours.

From other computers: Atari ST, Amiga IFF, Commodore 64, MacPaint and PICT, PC BMP, PCX and IMG, TIFF, PNG, GIF, JPEG and more. True colour pictures are remapped to 16 colours and fitted to the screen. In Quick Look the arrow keys go on to the next picture, a slide show of your disk.

Big pictures take a while: a MacPaint page or a large JPEG can need half a minute on a stock IIgs. Fonts, Finder icons and HiRes fonts are drawn too.

Sound you can see

Sounds play in Quick Look at once, on the IIgs' own Ensoniq chip: sampled sounds, rSoundSample resources, HyperStudio and Sound Shop sounds, ASIF instruments, and Audio IFF. A big sound starts at once and loads while it plays.

SoundSmith songs (and NoiseTracker GS's) play too, the way SoundSmith's own player plays them: fourteen tracks, with their instruments taken from the wave bank next to the song or from the ASIF files it names. And so do MOD songs from the Amiga and the PC, whatever their file type, their samples fitted into the Ensoniq’s 64K.

The documents

Word processor files show their text: AppleWorks and AppleWorks GS, Teach, MultiScribe and BeagleWrite (also their GS versions), and GraphicWriter 1.x and III, with long paragraphs wrapped to the window. S saves any of them as a plain text file in the other pane, for another computer or another program. AppleWorks data bases and spreadsheets, Apple Pascal files and random-access text come out readable too. H shows any file in hex instead.

AppleWorks GS, Teach, AppleWorks and GraphicWriter III documents go one better: View and Quick Look show them as they were written, in their own fonts and sizes, bold, italic and underlined, superscript and subscript, in colour, centred or aligned right, a page at a time. The fonts come from your System’s Fonts folder, and a font you don’t have is shown in Geneva. H gives the plain text.

Archives open like folders

Press Return on a disk image or an archive and you are inside it, as if it were a folder. Delete steps back out. GS Commander knows them by what is in them, not by their names.

• Disk images: .PO, .HDV, .2MG, .DSK and .DO with a ProDOS volume
• DOS 3.3 disks, their files given ProDOS types
• ShrinkIt archives (.SHK, .BXY, .SDK), compressed or stored, with folders and resource forks
• Binary II (.BNY) and ZIP archives

Inside, Quick Look and View work as anywhere else, and names ProDOS does not allow are made legal on the way out.

And you can make your own. The Tools menu turns the folder under the bar into a ProDOS disk image (140K or 800K when it fits, bigger when not) or a ShrinkIt archive, with folders, dates and resource forks. Write Image to Disk puts a disk image onto a real 3.5" or 5.25" disk, block by block, and never onto the disk you started from.

Finding things

Apple-F finds files and folders whose names match a pattern (* for any characters, ? for one) in the active folder and every folder in it, and, if you like, only the files with certain words in them. The results stay in the pane, each with its path, and you can copy, delete, view and tag them right there.

All about a file

Apple-I turns the other pane into an Info pane that follows the bar: what kind of file it is, its type and aux type, both forks' sizes, blocks, storage, dates and access. Tab into it to change the type, the aux type, or to lock a file or make it invisible. It is in the Panes menu.

Don’t know the number for a type? Type a word into Find a kind: song, picture, a type’s letters like MUS, or $D5. GS Commander lists the kinds that match, from its table of 448, and a Return or a click fills in the type and aux type. Even files the IIgs never had a type for are covered: mod lists the music kinds first.

Apple-K duplicates, Apple-J adds up the size of folders, Apple-G renames the tagged files by a pattern (PIC.##: PIC.01, PIC.02…), and the menus add Same Folder in Both Panes, Swap Panes and Show Invisible Files. The Volumes list shows how full each disk is.

Help at hand

Press 1 for Keyboard Shortcuts: every key, Apple-key command and mouse action in one list. And the Help menu’s File Types lists every file type and aux type RetroBrowse knows, 277 of them, with its number, its three-letter name and what it is. Type to narrow it down: a name like PIC, a word like sound, or a number like $C1 or $8006. Or press ? on a file to see its own type there.