InnerLimit

News

14 May 2008 - Official site of Nomad.NET was moved to www.nomad-net.info. This site will be used only for development stuff in future.

24 April 2008 - Blog related to Nomad.NET was created (Russian language only).

Introduction

Nomad.NET is the successor of Nomad, a powerful file manager written by me a couple of years ago. It is completely rewritten (no single line of code was taken from previous Nomad) using best ideas and algorithms and implementing everything in a completely new way.

Background

Several years ago I changed my employer and moved to Microsoft new technology called ".Net". For better understanding of many hidden areas, techniques and classes from new framework I started to write small simple applications that did what I knew the best - how to work with OS in file manager way. When I had dozens of such simple applications an idea to completely rewrite old Nomad on new framework had come. So in August 2006 the work began.

Current project state

Current project state is Beta 1, with almost all features from original Nomad implemented in a new way, more powerful and simple. Many new features were introduced too. Some features that I had not used in previous Nomad were dropped (for example custom toolbars support, and toolbars at all).

New Nomad was developed with multi threading in mind, so almost all long operations can take advantage of multi-core cpu (comparing, copying, searching, detecting archive format and so on - too many to list them all here).

I do not want to create all-in-one mega monster that plays mp3, shows movies, etc, as many other file managers do. My goal is to build only good file manager functionality. For other purposes there are dedicated programs that always do things better than such jack-of-all-trades programs.

Features

As for features of original Nomad, you can take a look at them on appropriate page. Here I describe the features that are significantly changed or just are new:

• One of the most powerful search engines on market (if I can say market, project is freeware). You can create very complex search rules, with ability to search in different encoding (complete encodings auto detect), use IFilter filters, apply custom text search rules (including regular expressions), search in hex, duplicates search and so on... For novices there is a simplified search that is not so scary at first sight.
• Powerful filtering system, based on the same core as search. You can use dedicated advanced filter dialog, or use simple toolstrip for quick filtering.
• Folder shortcuts were implemented in much more simple way that its predecessor.
• Much simpler, elegant and polished UI (program must look nice, right?) with support of themes, different toolstrip renderers and so on...
• Program layout was changed, too. You can use single panel or dual panel mode (horizontal or vertical). Each panel can have its own tree view that can be hidden or displayed horizontally or vertically.
• UI can simple scale according to your current system DPI settings, or manually (through Options).
• New breadcrumb folder toolstrip on every panel is much more powerful than simple folder name.
• Internal support for more archive types (using 7-Zip libraries). Program can also handle WCX Total Commander plug-in, even in more powerful way than Total Commander did. Currently only extracting is supported, no ability to create or modify them.
  
• FTP folders support added (with limitations yet, for example, only one http proxy allowed with no UI to configure).
• Many things were done more correctly - drag'n'drop from explorer, clipboard handling, shell file menus and so on.
• Support for shell shortcuts, url shortcuts (ftp only) and even shell folder shortcuts (rarely supported in other file managers).
  

As you can see, the main idea of new Nomad.NET is to do the same things in more correct and beautiful way.

Roadmap

I have no accurate roadmap as soon as the project is being made at my free time (and takes practically all this time). Current version is Beta 1 and right now it is very stable and have almost all planed features for the first version.

Features planned for future versions (you can email me if you have any good ideas):

• Ability to create new archives for primary formats 7-Zip, Zip, Tar. Wcx packing plug-ins support.
• Better FTP folders handling (support for more server types and proxies). Maybe secure FTP support.
• Support for custom item properties (EXIF, IDv2, meta tags, etc). Display such properties and search in them.
• Basic image preview and maybe thumbnail mode.
  
• Help (very low priority, I have neither time, nor desire to do this). It is not a big deal for advanced users. As for novice ones, the application has a lot of hints and infotips with feature descriptions.

Features already implemented:

• External tools feature (ability to call other programs from Nomad.NET with various command line arguments).
  
• Language translation (at this moment Russian and Belarusian translations exist)

Screenshots

Thanks

I wish to thank following people and organizations, with their explicit or implicit help this program came to life:

• www.codeproject.com and all of its authors and contributors. I took a lot of useful information from articles located on this site, and want to pay them same coin (I have plan to publish several articles related to Nomad development).
• Igor Pavlov and his excellent 7-Zip archiver.
• www.pinvoke.net for all correct and incorrect P/Invoke translations.
• Phil. Wright for excellent Office2007Renderer class.
• xasthom for idea of how to create my own vista progress bar and for initial code for it.
• Eyal Post for idea and implementation of IFilter reader (still I overwrote it completely).
• Mark James for silk icons set. I still miss some of icons for the program.
• TagLib# for excellent audio/video tag library. 

Translations

My English is not very good and I know this. So, if you find any translations bugs, misspelled words or sentences on these pages, please, drop a line to my email.

Downloads