User:IsmaelLuceno/UnixTree

UnixTree is a powerful and versatile console-mode, orthodox file manager, modeled very closely after the distinguished DOS program XTreeGold.

It provides both a fast and catchy interface for daily file and directory maintenance needs, as well as the ability to perform sophisticated tasks on arbitrary selections of particular files, all across the directory tree.

It works as a terminal program, or under it's internal X11-based terminal emulator: pcxterm.

History
In 1989, I visited the Xtree booth at Comdex, and asked the person there if the XTree company would be interested in a UNIX version of their program. I was an avid user of XTree on DOS, but was primarily a UNIX weenie. The person I talked to (I can't remember his name) said they probably would be interested, and it should be easy as XTree was entirely written in "C". He gave me the name of Henry Hernandez as the contact at XTree. I contacted Henry in January of 1990, and proposed a UNIX port of the XTree code. He replied me that XTree is rather entirely written in assembly, so no port would be possible. Furthermore, who was I to think I could duplicate the work of 15 programmers? Naturally, I have been somewhat annoyed about that, so I went into "hack mode". A month later, I had a working version, and I called him back up. This was in early February of that year. I asked him if I could show him a UNIX version of XTree, and he said he would be interested. I went up to the XTree office (in San Luis Obispo; I was living in Los Angeles at the time), with a box running SCO 3.2.2 and an Altos II terminal (to show that it worked on a terminal). They were blown away by the fact that I had all the XTree functionality implemented, and asked me to "finish it up" and come back. I returned to XTree in March with what I thought would be a finished program, only to be shown the prototype of their XTree-Gold product (my "port" was of XTree-Pro), which had stuff such as split windows, autoview, etc. I went home and went back into "hack-mode", and returned in June with a rather complete implementation of the XTree-Gold functionality (lacking only the ZIP support, context-sensitive help, and the application menu). They then agreed to buy the product from me on a royalty basis. They put together a team to product the "XTree for UNIX Systems" product, which was composed of the following:

Henry Hernandez Product director Harold Cook Project manager Rob Juergens Main Programmer Jim Pickering Programmer who did the applications menu code Ken Broomfield Programmer who did the context-sensitive help code Kameran Kashani Consultant who wrote the actual help text and the manual

Everyone except me and Kameran were located at XTree in San Luis Obispo. I worked in my spare time (at night) finishing the code. (I was working at the time for Sun Microsystems, who had sent me to Ashton-Tate to do the UNIX port of dBase IV). Kameran was in Santa Cruz, and did all the doc work (help & manual), and Ken & Jim provided their help system & application-menu stuff. It all came together to show at Uniforum in Jan 1991. We then released "xtree for UNIX Systems" version 1.0, which was available on SCO 3.2.2 and Interactive UNIX. (A side note: at this time Interactive was also producing the Norton Utilities for UNIX, which flopped because they "cheated" and didn't do things in the "proper" Unix way. Another story.) Another side note: since I was also working on the dBase IV port, I did a lot of things the same, and you can notice that the same *.trm files were used by dBase IV in their UNIX port. I used these *.trm files to describe the terminal because both termcap and terminfo were not sufficient to describe all the screen & keyboard functionality I needed, although the implementation used the termcap/ terminfo database as a default entry if no .trm file was found. But these databases didn't treat color the same way the PC did, and the concept of F1-F12, alt keys, etc. was beyond the capability offered. The original UNIX version of XTree used curses to do the I/O, but I ended up writing my own version of curses which was based on the *.trm files, but kept the screen paradigm of the original curses. (I still use that library in other projects I have done). Anyway, in June 1991, the dBase IV port was done, and I left Sun and went to work full-time for XTree, although I was still living in Los Angeles. In March of 1992, we released version 1.1, which contained bug fixes (of course), added tar/cpio support, and added SunOS and Ultrix as additional platforms. In May, the product was also bundled with the Mark Williams' product Coherent (a UNIX/XENIX clone). By the way, I also proposed an "XTree for VMS" back when we were actually doing work, but they weren't interested. It wouldn't be that hard to do. But the closest I came was adding support for the VMS file-system in the FTP logging code. As for why the product never took off, the main reason was that XTree Company never fully understood how to sell in the UNIX market. They were used to just throwing product onto shelves in computer stores, and had no concept of using reseller-channels (which was how UNIX software was sold). An interesting note: Sun Microsystem's magazine "SunWorld" in 1992 named "xtree for UNIX" as its Product of the Year (in the Utilities category). Then, in 1993, XTree company has bee sold to Central Point Software, and I was laid off, since Central Point was totally uninterested in any UNIX version of XTree. Central Point then turned around and sold the product to Symantec. I then took my version of the code, and added additional features such as mouse support, FTP logging, etc. But, of course, nothing was done with it; it was just an intellectual exercise at this time. Finally, at around June 2000, I needed to use my curses library for a cross-platform server (UNIX & NT), so I did the work of adding NT support to the curses library. To test it, I then added the NT support to my old XTree code, and got back into "xtree-mode". So the product is still alive, and has been updated recently. It runs on most UNIXes and on Windows/NT. The source code still is my own property (it was only licensed to XTree company on royalties basis), and because I know that people who actually got 'xtree for UNIX' loved it (I still use it all the time), I liked the idea to see the UNIX version back available to users. I decided to re-issue the product, merely a new name had to be introduced. This, finally, has been the starting signal for "UnixTree", to provide again to the public a powerful, XTree-like file manager for Unix systems.