[Coco] file manager

[Aaron Wolfe]

On Sat, Dec 10, 2011 at 11:42 AM, Joel Ewy <jcewy at swbell.net> wrote:
> On 12/10/2011 07:50 AM, Brett Gordon wrote:
>>
>> My CocoBoot core system is more or less stable.  I don't plan on
>> making any huge changes to the system, unless new hardware warrants.
>> It's time for me to start writing some applications for the system.
>> I figure the most handy utility would be a multi-device file manager
>> for RSDOS filesystem, as suggested by Nick Marentes.  I'm looking for
>> the communities thoughts and ideas for what it would like to see in a
>> file manager, or feedback if this kind of app is even needed.
>>
> This sounds like a profoundly good idea to me.  I would like to see it able
> to copy files between DriveWire and physical floppy disks, make DW disk
> images into floppies and vice-versa, and do the same with HDB-DOS-style disk
> images on IDE/SCSI drives.  It would also be very nice to be able to copy
> files between OS-9 RBF formatted and RS-DOS disks/images.  That would make
> many common file-shuffling jobs much easier.
>

I agree it sounds great.  Having an open tool like cocoboot understand
actual filesystems would be very powerful.
fwiw, you can copy between real floppy and drivewire floppy using
DECB, see http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/drivewireserver/index.php?title=Using_DriveWire#HDBDOSMode
but I never have found a fast and easy way to copy between DW and
hdbdos slots on the superide (or other hard drives using hdbdos).  You
can mount the HDBDOS partition under OS9, which can of course speak to
DW, SuperIDE, real FDD, and probably a few more things at once) and
get to them that way, but it really isn't convenient.  To go between
rsdos and os9, you can use the toolshed tools to pull the file out of
one image and put it into another, but again you have to get the file
into a image on the pc first, not always easy, and then off the image
back into the coco where you want it, not always easy.

So.. having seen how effortless cocoboot makes talking to lots of
different hardware (thanks to Brett's hard work!), I think a file
manager there would be quite handy.  I would focus on tasks that
benefit from it's multi-hardware support, since as mentioned there are
some very good file managers that work within DECB or OS9.  Tasks like
copy a full disk image from one place to another, or copy all files in
one filesystem into another.  If you wanted to get fancy, look at
loading .bins and make it a launcher.  then you're only one horrible
gui away from recreating Windows 1.0.

-Aaron