ZTreeBold v1.75 - by Chris Wenham

Legends were born in the DOS era. We knew they were legends when they were still alive and for a while we didn't believe they'd ever go away. WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, dBase, and XTree Gold. If God ever used a PC, XTree Gold would have been his file manager. At its peak, XTree Gold was matched by nothing and stood peerless on almost every DOS and Win 3.x PC in existence. You know you had a copy, be it a legitimate one or one 'accidentally' left in your bag as you went home from work one night. Your fingers knew its keystrokes better than your eyes knew the sight of your mother. You could almost survive with XTree alone, without the need for word processors or spreadsheets, just copying and moving files around all day long the way Nature intended it.

And then you got OS/2 and XTree busted up all your Extended Attributes. Ah shucks!

So as it happens, someone -- who shall probably earn a sainthood from the XTree loving OS/2 community -- went ahead and wrote a clone for OS/2; one that matches it flawlessly right down to the most obscure CTRL/ALT keystroke and the cute little way it asks you to type "PRUNE" before annihilating a directory tree. That someone is Kim G. Henkel, and the name of the clone is ZTreeBold.

Installation

ZTreeBold is, of course, a character mode application rather than a Presentation Manager (GUI) one, that may be run either in a window or full-screen as you please. To install it you simply unzip it into a directory of your choice and create a program object for it on your Desktop. No automated installation scripts anywhere. The documentation is available as both a competent online help file or text file.

Interface and Functionality

The interface is pretty much what it's all about, as the author didn't faithfully copy XTreeGold's look and feel just to be a wise guy. As previously mentioned, every keystroke, every ASCII-character carved directory pane is identical to the classic DOS XTreeGold. Copies are accomplished with CTRL-C, toggling the tag on a file is done with a tap of the 'T' key, and as you hold down the CTRL or ALT keys the menu at the bottom of the screen changes to show what new functions are available.

ZTreeBold, even though being a fully multithreaded 32-bit app with the ability to handle EAs and long filenames, is definitely keyboard driven all the way through and will ignore whatever mouse movements or clicks you try to make.

The main window (.GIF, 11K) is split into three main segments as far as file listings go. The first and largest is the directory tree where the attention of the cursor keys is initially directed. At the bottom is a short listing of files in the currently highlighted directory -- changing instantly the moment you move the cursor to a new directory on the tree. To the right is the file and selection statistics area, where the file sizes, dates and attributes of the currently selected files or directory is shown.

Tap Enter while a directory is highlighted and the view changes, eliminating the directory tree and showing an enlarged file listing (.GIF, 12.6K) of the directory the cursor last rested on.

Obviously, if you're new to the program, it might be unappealing to work with something so keyboard oriented and ungraphical. But it's XTreeGold/ZTreeBold's interface which gives it the unrivaled power that made it so popular in the first place. You don't highlight-drag-n-drop, you tag-point-n-move. A difference that shows its strengths best when managing large numbers of files in multiple directories. You see, ZTreeBold doesn't care if the files you tag aren't in the same directory, and with a single keystroke you can have it show ALL of the files in ALL of the directories in one big pane -- a task beyond the Workplace shell and most other drag-n-drop oriented file managers.

ZTreeBold is often the tool of choice if one wishes to perform mass attribute or name changes on dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of files in scattered directories.

In this way ZTreeBold is also extremely efficient at copying or moving entire directory structures intact, with the flexibility of omitting any file or files nested as deeply into the tree as you want. Deleting whole trees is also as easy, with a quaint way of confirming the kill (typing "PRUNE" at the prompt, to be sure you really, really know what you're doing).

When it comes to viewing, ZTreeBold doesn't match up quite as elegantly as the original XTreeGold did with its miriad of custom written graphic and word processor viewing modules. Instead, ZTreeBold defers the task to other programs, launching them whenever you highlight a file and press 'O' for 'Open.' To change what programs get launched and add support for any file extension ad infinitum, you need to create or modify the "*.CMD" files found in ZTreeBold's directory, where the '*' represents the extension of the file type being dealt with. So, for example, creating a file called "INF.CMD" with instructions inside to launch VIEW.EXE will let ZTreeBold automatically pick the INF file viewer to open any files ending with .INF.

ZTreeBold does, however, have a basic text viewer like that of classic XTreeGold, which can be used to view a file (ASCII or Binary) in hex, masked or unmasked. This viewer can search though a file, plus mark lines to be copied and appended to another named file. In addition to that, ZTreeBold also supports management of archives (.GIF, 9.8K) like ZIP, letting you look at the files inside the archive, extracting and manipulating them as desired.

A Lawsuit in the Making?

Is ZTreeBold really, such a good clone of XTreeGold as to warrant a lawsuit for trademark "look and feel" infringement? Maybe, maybe not. However, the makers of the original XTreeGold Gold aren't developing the program anymore and the clone is not perfect in every regard so legal proceedings are very unlikely. There are a few features missing from ZTreeBold that show up as grayed out options in the keyboard menus, such as Autoview, merge tags and the drop-down style menus. But for the bulk of XTreeGold's power in an OS/2 friendly package, one may find it easy to overlook these flaws.

ZTreeBold v1.75

by Kim G. Henkel
download from the OS/2 Supersite (ZIP, 211k)
Registration: US$35.00

Chris Wenham is the Senior Editor of OS/2 e-Zine! -- a promotion from Assistant Editor which means his parking spot will now be wide enough to keep his bicycle and a trailer.

Copyright © 1998 - Falcon Networking

ISSN 1203-5696