Not A Commander / News: Recent posts

I've needed to build NAC on a recent RedHat and that has turned out to be surprizingly difficult and brought the need for some fixes. Some of them are fixes for the genuine NAC bugs, and some are workarounds for the bugs in glibc and Tk.But now I can say that NAC works on Linux again.

Not A Commander is yet another graphical clone of Norton Commander(tm), done with emphasis on convenience of work with command line. Also a lot of Tk widgets and class infrastructure has been developed for this project.

The February snapshot includes:

* the viewer selection position becomes always visible when moved (and that made the resizes with an active selection much faster too)
* minor improvements in the class infrastructure
* naciew in hex mode now can display selection (but it can't be changed in hex mode yet)
* the colors for selections can now be set in tune.tcl, and with options to the viewer widget

Today's snapshot includes the following changes:

* selections work in the wrap mode too
* fixed a race in stext1 quick partial redisplay
* fixed the C code to build on UnixWare again

Finally Not A Comander is back in active development:
it's nearly winter and I'm done with vactions and racing
for this year.

The new snapshot 031119 contains optimizations to make
the selections in naciew faster.

There were also other developments. First, I've tried out
Mozilla. I've felt that the menus in NAC are kind of slow
and had concerns about it, but compared to the menus in
Mozilla NAC is just lightning fast. Taking 10 seconds
to display a simple menu on a not very old machne
is not unusual for Mozilla. Second, Usenix has made
my article on Tk geometry managers available online -
see the link at the NAC come page.

I was going to work on implememtation of the selections
in naciew (the viewer) but that required a bit of reorganization first. And that led to improved performance. So I went ahead and made more optimizations. Surprisingly, the biggest performance killer turned out to be not the scripting stuff but the double-buffering of graphics in X11. And here we go: a new, faster snapshot. Plus a number of bug fixes.

Finally Not A Commander has accumulated at least basic
implementations of at least all the basic functions.
So the prototype stage is complete and the project
enters the 1.0-alpha stage with the snapshot
nac-1.0-SNAP-010624.

A screenshot is available now at the home page. Or
the direct URL is:
http://nac.sourceforge.net/nacscr.jpg