Try DosNavigator. It has so many features like nothing else! There is also one VERY small program calls VolkovCommander, which I drop onto my boot floppy disk with MS-DOS for troubleshootings.

DonutKing wrote:

Quikmenu doesn't do anything if you right click. But if you click the FILES button up the top it gives you a basic mouse driven file manager. However, for DOS file management you can't go past XTree Gold (although its a textmode application and predominantly keyboard based, but very powerful).

XTree Gold is THE SHIT. I love it to pieces, have for nearly 20 years. I still use ZTreeWin at work, I'm that used to it.

XTree Gold actually has a menu system built in. It has collapsible submenu, and each entry can be a short script without any external files.

So, if you have it, it's a really flexible tool.

Norton Commander or some clone?

Volkov Commander 4.05 is the king on usability, small memory and disk footprint, and it blazing fast, made with Assembler.

Xtree Gold was definitely the best and most powerful file manager for DOS. I still use Ztree too. However the best DOS GUI was PCTools. Very userfriendly in the days of a very userunfriendly OS. It could be used to launch apps since it removed itself from memory and had file/disk management features.

Norton Desktop came out after PCTOOLS and seemed like a bloated copy of PCTOOLS to me.

I was always an NC user because it was the fastest in navigating up and down directories when I had DOS 3.3.

DOSSHELL 5 was ok since it was included with DOS 5 and made it easier for noobs to manage files.

There was one called IDCSHELL which I used it heavily in the BBS era. It was a file and compression manager that was a frontend for LZH/ARJ etc. but was one of the first that had built-in ZIP & ARC. Later versions of XTG and NC came with ZIP/ARC built-in.

Even Lotus, maker of famous spreadsheet had their own DOS GUI - Magellan. I tried it but wasn't impressed.

Cyberdyne wrote:

Volkov Commander 4.05 is the king on usability, small memory and disk footprint, and it blazing fast, made with Assembler.

It wrecked my fat once. I wouldn't ever touch VC again. It was a good thing the PC I tried it on had expendable data that didn't need a backup.

Come to think of it, DISPLAY also has some pretty good file-management capabilities, in addition to being a versatile image (and movie!) viewer. It's available at http://www.resoo.org/docs/dos/free_software/graphics.htm . Not really a GUI, technically, but it's free, at least.

"I have this!" -Barry Burton, Resident Evil 😀

http://lcars24.sourceforge.net/

I love this frontend. So fun.

for those still interested, more info on this whole thing is available here:
http://www.softpanorama.org/OFM/index.shtml

I remember I had Packard Bell Navigator installed on my dos system a long time ago. I didn't use it much but still thought it to be a fun gui.

Here are some links.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packard_Bell_Navigator
http://toastytech.com/guis/pbnav.html

Apparently there were different versions, and I am sure mine was version 1. I don't know much about the other versions.

http://www.guidebookgallery.org/guis/pbnav

Does anyone know here about "3+ menus" (or "+3 menus")? I can't find it anywhere on the net 😖

I use the filemanager for all my DOS needs, it is just awesome: http://ndn.muxe.com/
it's Necromancer's DOS Navigator, originating from the original DN...