Do you have a favourite application on your PC that you simply couldn’t live without?

I do. It’s a utility called Total Commander.

If you remember the good old days of MS-DOS in the 80s, you might have used Norton Commander, an essential app in those days for easy file and data management where the alternative for such activity was writing at the command line.

With NC, you had two panels, either of which contained the directories and files on your computer or other device. That made it dead easy to copy or move files.

There were other such apps, too, but NC was the one for me. I still have version 2 for MS-DOS in a box of diskettes in the attic.

So if you remember Norton Commander, you’ll get a good idea of Total Commander which does for Windows what NC did for MS-DOS. See these screenshots to get an idea.

But there’s much more. TC has the best FTP client I’ve yet used, built in to the app. It has a zip file packer and unpacker. A file viewer. It’s highly customizable. It has support for external plugins. Etc.

Here’s details of the program’s features.

Total Commander is the program that I’ve had the longest continuous relationship with of any software. Released as shareware, and originally called Windows Commander, I purchased a license back in 1994 when version 1.4 was released on one floppy disk (remember those?).

I remember paying developer Christian Ghisler the princely sum of ten Swiss francs (he’s Swiss) for my license. I have a two-digit license number, and proud of it!

This is the best software value I can imagine as every upgrade since then has been free to licensed users.

The latest version is 7.02 released last week. I can’t recommend this utility program more highly.

Do you have a favourite application you can’t live without?