by Dale Farris, President, Golden Triangle PC Club

ZTreeWin is a text-mode file and directory manager for Windows 95/98/NT, and has been developed as a native Win32 alternative to its older DOS father, XTree Gold. XTree Gold is a well known, dos-based program formerly owned by Norton Utilities. Norton was bought by Symantec, but Symantec ended up deciding to retire XTree Gold, which at the time still worked under Win3.1

XTree fans trying to run the program in Win95 found its inability to cope with long file names was a problem, and the release of Win95 OSR2 and the FAT32 file system seemed to doom XTree to the graveyard of old dos applications that no longer could run in the newer environments.

An XTree Gold fan, Kim G. Henkel, used the original program’s interface and feature set and rewrote from the ground up a new version compatible with both FAT32 and the NTFS (Windows NT) file systems. The result is called ZTree Win, a newer version of the famous XTree Gold, now designed for a Win 95/98/NT machine.

ZTree Win duplicates the old XTree look and feel, supports long file names and provides nearly all the much loved features of its predecessor. A text viewer is built in, and native format viewing of other file types is supported via downloadable "helper" applications.

The purpose of ZTree Win is to provide all the core functionality of the older XTree Gold, so it would help if a user had familiarity and experience with the older dos based program. The default editor is edit.com, built into Windows 95, although other text-mode applications can be configured to load as the user’s favorite file editor.

When this application runs, the user is expected to understand that it will run in a dos window, inside their Window 95/98/NT environment.

ZTree Win’s improvements over the original include using around 400K of memory, it will allocate and free memory blocks dynamically as required, the default video mode is 25 x 80, a user may change and save these video modes, it does not hog the CPU while waiting for keyboard activity, it can copy and search open files, directory grafting works, it supports long filenames, and it has flexible support of any archiving program.

Other highlights and features include graft, prune and duplicate entire branches, copy, move, delete, rename, and time-stamp one or thousands of files in a single operation, display the module version information for selected files, create shortcuts to selected files and directories, log files on a hard drive, allow one to search for text or locate particular filenames, and an internal file viewer with HEX editing ability.

For most new computer users, if there is a great deal of unfamiliarity with these features, then this dos program probably is not for you. Look instead to the file management procedures already built into the graphical user interface common in a Windows 95/98/NT environment.

For old dos hounds however, especially those with experience with the older XTree Gold, and with a higher level of comfort with this dos based program, this neat file manager may provide some features that are either not in Windows, or are more quickly controlled in this program.

ZTreeWin has been developed to provide all the powerful functionality of the past, while avoiding all the DOS imposed limitations, and is a useful utility for users skilled in dos commands.

Contact Information:

ZEDTEK, Inc.

P.O. Box 15016

Wilmington, NC 28408

800-414-4268

http://www.ztree.com

Product Availability and Pricing:

Latest version 1.41

Beta releases regularly posted for downloading

Single license $30