I used to use XTree Gold, which was... golden. I always heard of Midnight Commander but never really got around to using it. I should probably fix that.

What I never got was why this style of TUI (MS edit.com, qbasic, etc) isn't really carried through in modern tradition? I really enjoyed these when when I was younger... yet even textual or ratatui apps don't really bring this interface to the terminal. (Or why screen-coordinate-based terminals aren't the norm to base TUI apps upon... this aspect just seems "obvious" but in this aspect modern terminal emulates seem lightyears behind MS-DOS, of all things).

Perhaps the rewrite of edit [1] will spawn a ressurgence of this TUI style?

[1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/edit-is-now-open-...

Same here, back then I found a little known file manager called DM.COM. That was my # 1 goto in DOS for files. IMO, it is the best.

You can do this to get information on how to download it:

curl 'gopher://sdf.org/0/users/jmccue/repository/dm220.txt' > dm220.txt

Yes, I also have fond memories of quite a few TUI apps for DOS. Not sure if it’s pure nostalgia, it might be. But then it feels like dark magic that you could have 40kB .COM or 100kB .EXE doing so many things and looking so nicely..