Why I am abandoning Altap Salamander

This is a place for users to discuss Altap Salamander. Please feel free to ask, answer questions, and express your opinion. Please do not post problems, bug reports or feature requests here.
Quitting
Posts: 1
Joined: 06 Aug 2014, 07:33

Why I am abandoning Altap Salamander

Post by Quitting »

After MANY years of use, I am abandoning Altap Salamander. Do you want to know why?
Because we are in August 2014, and there is still no Unicode support. They keep promising but it never comes.
Anytime a file name contains even a single Unicode character, that file is not accessible from Altap. Non English characters cannot even be displayed.
This is very frustrating if you work in a multilingual environment.
I have been waiting for years in the hope of getting Unicode support, but now enough is enough.
gregzeng
Posts: 17
Joined: 02 Jun 2009, 08:35
Location: Australian Capital Territory
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Re: Why I am abandoning Altap Salamander

Post by gregzeng »

Pity you want to abandon the one (& ONLY ONE) International language on Planet Earth. It's not perfect, but the software engineers' have yet to perfect it properly. Perhaps the next United Nations project?

Curious what you will use instead. On my Linux distros, there is nothing worthwhile.

In Windows, only Q-DIR is anywhere as powerful as SS, but has more features which should be added to SS, IMHO. When I've looked occasionally at other file-browsers (Windows, Linux, Android), none seems perfect. Not even SS.

Are you a command-line god, like the gurus living in Linux? Not meaning to be rude, nor offensive. Jut wanting, like you, for SS to become "perfect", one day.
Retired (1985) Chief Information Officer, Australian Capital Territory.
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TimeGhost
Posts: 16
Joined: 27 Jan 2006, 20:00
Location: Northeastern USA

Re: Why I am abandoning Altap Salamander

Post by TimeGhost »

I can understand the frustration here. I'm bothered only by the lack of Unicode support for the viewer, but I can use my text editor in read only mode to compensate.

I couldn't image dealing often with this kind of problem in the Panels themselves. I do recall not using certain Greek letters in my file names after determining that Salamander couldn't handle them.

Good luck!
Yuriy
Posts: 92
Joined: 07 Apr 2012, 07:16
Location: Kiev, Ukraine

Re: Why I am abandoning Altap Salamander

Post by Yuriy »

Hmm, I don't think I have ever seen a file with a name not displayed right in Salamander (and I am on Russian Windows with a lot of files named in Cyrillic letters).

Yes, internal viewer not able to display Unicode *.txt files is an inconvenience - but I don't have so many such files (mostly *.reg from Regedit Version 5), and it is not much work to press F4 to view them instead of F3.

So I am more bothered with slow corrections of bugs in Salamander 3.0X versions, with slow plugin enhancement, with that very slow implementation of the long-promised 'new payment gateway' etc. I hope the developers are not 'abandoning Altap Salamander' altogether.
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TimeGhost
Posts: 16
Joined: 27 Jan 2006, 20:00
Location: Northeastern USA

Re: Why I am abandoning Altap Salamander

Post by TimeGhost »

Okay, I reproduced the problem that the OP might be experiencing. It's not that SS cannot display a file with an "unusual" character in it. It's that it cannot operate on it in some way. Here's one example:

Using a command prompt, I used the copy command to copy a text file to a file with the lowercase Greek letter sigma in it, which SS cannot handle.

c:\> COPY readme.txt ALT-229.txt

(The ALT-229 means to hold down the ALT key and then press the numbers 2 2 9 on the numeric keypad, then release ALT.)

In my command prompt window, the ALT-229 appears as a lowercase sigma. When I view the directory in SS, I see "S.txt" but I cannot copy it or delete it with SS. However, the internal viewer can recognize it and display its contents.
scruball
Posts: 1
Joined: 16 Dec 2014, 17:35

Re: Why I am abandoning Altap Salamander

Post by scruball »

The Development of v3 of Salamander started in the fall of 2012. Even then the most requested features were Unicode, UAC and 64bit support. Two years into development those features are still not fully implemented if at all. I've been using Salamander since 1.x versions and it has a special place in my heart, it will always be one of my favorite alltime software. But I am not buying v3 and I am abandoning Salamander also. Salamander is just too outdated and outmoded and the pace of development is just ridiculous slow. I've been patient, hoping for 2 years that the software would be updated and feel at home with newer versions of Windows. Simply the alternatives to Salamander are better and much more modern. FreeCommander doesn't even cost anything and though little bit basic in comparison it still does the basics better than Salamander.

So in short - goodbye. I hope some day Salamander will be worth getting back to. Good luck.
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Ether
Posts: 1471
Joined: 10 May 2007, 16:08
Location: Czech Republic
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Re: Why I am abandoning Altap Salamander

Post by Ether »

scruball wrote:Even then the most requested features were Unicode, UAC and 64bit support. Two years into development those features are still not fully implemented if at all.
What's missing in 64bit support?
Ελληνικά rulez.
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