Why isn't there a clone of Total Commander for OS X?

Question

Is there some reason why somebody doesn't create pure, clean copy of Total Commander for OS X?

Are there some technical, legal problems why all TC clones are so.... weird and not as usable as original TC?

Answer 1

Here's why:

First, in 2004, Total Commander author C. Ghisler said in Total Commander forums that for Mac, there is MuCommander:

Für Mac gibt es den MuCommander:

http://www.mucommander.com/

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Author of Total Commander http://www.ghisler.com

In 2014, this was discussed again by forum members in context of crowdfunding of OS X version:

What exactly do you want?

1) Ghisler creating TC for OS X? Won't happen if I understood his comments correctly. Has nothing to do with funding.

2) Someone else creating TC for OS X? Requires an agreement between the OS X author and Ghisler about the rights to the name of the program.

3) Someone else creating a software on the same (or higher) level as TC.

2) and 3) could be funded by the crowd or otherwise.

Author's post in the thread was, I quote:

A few years ago I started porting TC to Linux. It cost me about 6 month of my life, but the result was not really good:

• unexplainable crashes with background functions (e.g. copy in background)
• no plugins (obviously)

Therefore I think that even if I created a special version for OS X, it wouldn't be useful because there are no plugins. Even a few years after the release of the 64-bit version, there are far less plugins than for 32-bit, although most plugins could simply be recompiled.

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Author of Total Commander http://www.ghisler.com

So you can see it is highly unlikely that author will create Total Commander port for OS X. So you won't see identical product. Perhaps someone would start making it via crowdfunding and with consent of the TC author (in questionable areas) but currently it seems that MuCommander is the recommended option.

And if someone really wants Total Commander on Mac, then he's already running it there. :)

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EDIT: Anyone seeking software recommendations (instead of learning about reasons behind TCMD), visit Software Recommendations site.