Strange things excite me, things even other programmers would consider strange to be excited about. Every once in a while, something comes along that excites me in multiple ways. One of those things is the orthodox file manager, Far.

The far manager was developed by Eugene Roshal, who created WinRar. It was originally shareware, but has recently been made open source.

I’ve known about Far for a while. I first discovered it looking for a file manager that could handle a directory with thousands of files at a job where I was doing ETL operations. It was installed on my machine by a developer of ReSharper who was troubleshooting a very strange bug on my system remotely. Also I worked in a company where several Russian’s used it daily.

However, while I toyed with it several times, I never took the time to really get to know it until a few weeks ago. By really getting to know it I meant installing several plugins, and experiencing the “theres a plugin for that” joy several times over.

Overview

Far is a command line based file manager with two columns and a command prompt. The command prompt behaves similar to cmd.exe, but not exactly. For example, in a standard command prompt typing “cd e:\foo” whike you are on the c:\ drive will change the current directory on the E: drive but you still have to type e: to get to that folder. In Far typing cd e:\foo does both. One other difference, that bothered my unix sensibilities, is “cd ~” changes to the folder that far is installed to. In unix this changes to the users home directory so I was expecting similar behavior. There are probably many other useful command line enhancements that I’ve yet to discover yet as well.

Far File Manager

Installing Far and plugins.

Far is available on http://farmanager.com. There is a 1.7 and 2.0 version. The 2.0 version supports unicode asnd the 1.7 version us the legacy ascii version. You can get 64 bit binaries for both versions. You can install far via an MSI, or a 7-zip archive.

After you install Far, you will want to install several plugins. I will highlight my favorite ones here. ote that while binaries compiled against the far 1.7 SDK will work with Far 2.0, 32 bit plugins will not work with 64 bit far. For this reason you probably want to install the 32 bit version of Far, unless you are like me and like pain.

Except where mentioned, these plugins can either be found at the plugring site, or for 64 bit binaries, the evil programmers google code project. I will go through some of the plugins I like below.

7-Zip

As far as I know, there is no 64 bit version of this available yet. However, I probably just haven’t found it yet. If you install far without this plugin, you can browse the contents of most archives in Far. However, you will not be able to copy files out of them. I’ve yet to try getting the built-in archive support full working. However, with all the archives supported by 7-zip, I’m in no hurry to.

Event Viewer

This works like a text mode only version of eventvwr.exe. I’ve yet to find a truly compelling case to use it over the standar gui version. However, its nice to have an alternative tool for any job.

Service Manager

This is really convenient. It lists drivers and services temperately. It also allows you to edit things you can’t in the mmc snap-in, such as the path to the binary the service executes. Finally, it lets you create a new service. You rarely need to do this, but when you do its hard to find a good tool for the job.

User Manager

This one is really useful, especially on XP Home edition. Functionality is similar to the “Local Users and Groups” section of the Computer Management MMC snap-in on XP Pro. The thing I really love about it is you can set the “User must change password at next logon” flag on a user in XP Home Edition. I spent the good part of a train ride from Penn Station to Islip on Friday failing to achieve this in other ways. I’m not saying its the only way this task can be done. I’m just saying that this plugin will let me accomplish this task easily.

User Must Change Password At Next Logon

WinSCP

The arbitrariness of alphabetical order has put what is perhaps the most useful plugin last. There is a GUI scp/sftp client for windows called WinSCP. The author also made a Far plug-in based on the same code.

This plug-in, along with the 7-zip one, also take advantage of one of the most powerful intrinsic features of Far. With Far, you can copy any file from one panel to another, regardless of whether the panels contain a local folder, a unc path, the inside of an archive, or a sftp folder. Because of this, Far is a great tool for moving files to and from remote servers.

Conclusion

Far is a great file manager, and I will spend more time getting to know it. I think all programmers and sys-admins that work with Windows should get familiar with it as well.

As I mentioned before, I am a big fan of msi installers on windows. So I was really excited to see Garrett Serack announce an OSS package management system called CoApp that he has been authorized to work full time on.

In my point of view, Garrett really gets it. I’m hoping as a side effect of this project, WiX will get all sorts of dependency handling improvements.

I’ll be watching how this develops very closely.

Update: It seems that the facts presented to me in the initial bug report are not correct. I will be revising this article after the facts are settled. For now read the comments.

It all started with a simple bug encountered while trying to get PHP and WCF to play nice. Before you know it I was attempting to compile PHP on windows myself. That’s when I realized how deep the rabbit hole really goes.

These days I program in PHP and .NET for a living. In a past life I was a unix admin for small ISP where most of the internal unix infrastructure was FreeBSD while the managed customers tended to run Redhat.  Due to the unique path of my IT career, I usually don’t have a problem compiling open source software primarily targeted for unix on windows. PHP has proven to be a bit of an exception. However, with a little struggle, I got it to compile.

In this case the crux of the struggle was not a lack of documentation, but documentation outdated to the point of being wrong. This is perhaps the one exception to the rule postulated by Dick Brandon, “Documentation is like sex . . . when it is good, it is very, very good; and when it is bad, it is better than nothing.” Thankfully, Pierre of libgd fame pointed me in the right direction on the mailing list. So being a good netizen, I submitted a bug report so that someone with commit access to the php source repo could straighten the mess out. This was the response I received:

We don’t understand the build requirements or system.

You have to ask the Microsoft guys to update that file.
http://no.php.net/manual/en/install.windows.building.php was one of our
best Windows know-how (not-microsoft-employee) guy shot at documenting
the process, but the feedback he got from Microsoft employees was “this
is crap. its all wrong”.

Sorry, we simply do not know how to do this.

That was a little disheartening. I asked them to mark the readme file as outdated, and I asked them how to contact Microsoft. This was the response I received:

Updated the file to say its outdated.

As for contacting the Microsoft guys, try surfing around on
http://windows.php.net

We have tried multiple times to get these docs updated, with no luck so
far, and like I said; our last attempt was shot down and they wanted
those docs to be reverted.

I’m sorry, you are simply on your own here.

So it seems my only resort is to blog about it and hope someone from Microsoft is in earshot. If you care about PHP on windows, spread the word. Spread this article with twitter, digg, reddit, or just plain old email. If you have the ear of anyone in Microsoft give it a bend. I’ve never attempted blogger activism like this, but I don’t know what else to do. I much prefer to fix problems myself than delegating or inspiring. However, this is one case where I need to “have a little help from my friends.” I don’t even know what Microsoft finds wrong with the proposed updates to the documentation, so submitting updated documentation seems pointless.

Today I attended LIPHP. While I began attending LIPHP since I was programming in PHP at the time, I am mostly a .NET programmer these days. The fact that I have recently inherited an abandoned OSS projet written in .NET, further entrenches me as an open source .NET programmer.

I was told by a fellow LIPHP member that I cannot truely write open source applications in .NET, or something to that effect. Naturally, this is where I attempt to disprove that.

If we study the history of open source and free software, we can see a gradual evolution marked by periods of puncuated equilibrium. RMS created the free software foundation to recreate a software ecosystem that he believed existed in the software industry earlier in his career. Linus Torvald releases a kernel that does all the things minix would not do. ESR coined the term ope source to reject the Free Software Foundation’s idealism in favor of pragmatism. Microsoft releases the WiX project on sourceforge and eventualyl launches codeplex. Java becomes more and more open source.

During this time, compromises had to be made for ideal situations to be realized. pieces of propietary unix had to be recreated piece by piece and released as open source. First the basic unix shell commands, followed by things like the text editor vi. Some peices fell out of favor as other alternatives developed. The linux kernel as opposed to the hurd. Open sourced sun Java code replacing reversed engineered clones.

Somewhere along the line the pc revolution and Microsoft happened. Unix is now completely open sourced. Sun has open sourced most of its code, including newly developed code such as ZFS and dtrace. But no one uses unix or its clones. They use Microsoft Windows now.

Of course that previous statement must be qualified. There is a sizable minority of desktops running some form of unix. Mainframes still exist, and unix has a strong server installation base. However, Microsoft has a dominante share of the desktop at the moment, and a good share of the server market.

So where does open source fit in in the Microsoft world. Well first of all, many opens source applications written for unix have been ported to windows. Secondly, many open source apps have been written primarally targeting windows. This much is obvious, but does nothing to counter the claims that my .NET code is any less open source than open source code that runs on unix.

So how do I counter his claims. First of all I can point out WINE and REACTOS. Wine allows you to run windows applications on linux. Its good enough these days to run World of Warcraft and internet explorer. It can also run important, boring business apps, but those two applications demonstrate the true power of Wine. ReactOS is a windows NT clone. It is buggy and development is slow. However, quality is continually improving, and while windows is a moving target, it has several advantages. First of all as windows matures, it adds few new core feature. Secondly, ReactOS uses Wine for its usermode dlls. Most Reactos programmers concentrate on kernel development.

Secondly I can point to Mono, the .NET implementation that runs on Windows and unix. Now in my particular cases, I write .NET apps that would be hard to port to mono, but not impossible.

Thirdly, I can point to the fact that users of my software gain the utility benifits of open source. While they have to invest in the sunk costs of the Windows OS, I avoid them specific other expenses. At the moment these are Visual Studio, Microsoft Access, and QueueExplorer.  Certainly I can function with more “pure” alternatives on windows. In fact I have in the past and continue to attempt to. However, at times external factors (those that pay me) compel me to use a Microsoft stack. Therefore, I spend some of my free time writing open source solutions that make it easier to support the Microsoft stack. In other words I scratch an itch.