Introduction

Captain Nemo is copyrighted shareware. It is not public domain nor free. If you use it beyond a trial period, not longer than 30 days (press F12 then F3 any time to see how long you have been using Captain Nemo), you are required to register it, by paying 25 US dollars or 150 French franks to the author. See below for details.

Captain Nemo version 1.8 is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. You can use it at your own risk, and report whatever problems you have encountered with it. You are free to copy this software ONLY if you include this document file and all the other accompanying files with it. You may NOT charge anyone for a copy of this software other than a small copying fee. You may NOT include this software with any commercial software without the written consent of the author.

You can contact me either by writing an e-mail to:

Adam Mirowski <mir@sun.com>

Adam Mirowski
Residence Les Cypres
10, rue Caruel de Saint-Martin
F-78150 Le Chesnay
FRANCE

If you want to submit a bug report, notably about a failing assert, note that Captain Nemo allows to save the current screen content (as left by previously executed external commands, Captain Nemo itself for example) to a file, from the Editor, using the Ctrl-K-M key combination.

About registering: The time has shown that for money transfers, sending US or convertible (Deutsche Marks, Guldens, Swiss Franks, etc.) cash in an envelope is the most cost-effective way, and even unofficially recommended by my bank. You may send checks in French franks drawn on a French bank. Eurocheques (in French franks) will work very fine. You can also use postal fund transfer methods, eg. International Money Orders, which are very cheap. Please do not send checks in non-French currencies, since they cost me a huge amount of money to cash.

When you register and request one or more licenses, you will be provided with a replacement nemo.exe file, not displaying periodical reminding screens and not showing the Unregistered version text. This replacement executable file is copyrighted, but unlike the shareware package, it is confidential and serialized. It can only be used on as many computers at the same time as the number of licenses granted to you, and cannot be distributed, disclosed or otherwise made available to third parties under any condition.

Features

Modifications since the previously released versions are listed in the whats-up.doc file.

These features are either specific to Captain Nemo or extended with regard to NC v.4:

Archives	Transparent FTP	File attribute editing	Long filenames
Directory monitoring	Custom directories	Short and long pathnames	descript.ion files
Duplicate file finder	Task switcher	Extended file attributes	Quick view
132 columns	Associations	User menus	Viewer
Editor	History	Directory panels	Last directories
File operations	File finder	Command line	Tree panels
NCD	Disk Status	Backscroll	Symbolic links
Hard links	Directory comparing	Wildcards	Various

Transparent archive handling

Instead, Captain Nemo considers archives as extensions of the file system. Any archive can be transparently mounted onto the file system naming space when you request that, and appears as a directory from that point, until it is un-mounted.

Archives are mounted when you set the current directory inside them, ie. enter them, for example using the Enter or Ctrl-PageDown keys over the archive entry in a Directory Panel. You can even type CD archive.ext on the command line.

Because archives become just directories, all Captain Nemo operations can apply to them and you are not limited to copy/move/view operations. You can type a pathname leading to and into a mounted archive in all fields which accept pathnames, and Captain Nemo willl understand that an archive operation is required. There is no need to have mounted archives visible in any panel to be able to copy files to or from them. For example, to move a file into a mounted file.zip, just press F6 over the file, then select the file.zip pathname from the pathname clipboard using ArrowDown (or retype it if it is not there yet), press Enter twice to confirm and voila!

You can execute external commands on files in archives, for example compare a file in archive with a file outside of it. Files pasted from an archive into the command line are automatically extracted into a temporary directory and Captain Nemo momentarily switches to this directory for the duration of the external command. You must have the current directory inside the archive for this to work. Files in archives can even be modified by the external command; Captain Nemo will remember to compress them back into the archive after the command completes.

I called this technology Captain Nemo file-system, or Nemo FS in shortcut. Look for more description in the whats-up.doc file section concerning version 1.0 of Captain Nemo.

In addition to the bread-and-butter ARC, ARJ, LZH, PAK, ZIP and ZOO archive formats supported by NC, Captain Nemo also handles:

• Additional shareware formats:
  • RAR
• Unix-originated formats:
  • compress(1) .Z
  • GZIP .gz
  • tar(1) and its variant, GNU tar(1), which allows pathnames longer than 100 chars
  • .tar.Z and .tar.gz compressed tar(1) files.
  • ls(1) recursive directory listing
  • FTP site seamless access
• OS/2-originated or specific formats:
  • unpack.exe and unpack2.exe, all versions since OS/2 1.0
  • FTP server directory listing
• Windows and DOS-originated or specific formats:
  • expand.exe, both SZDD and KWAJ variants (filenames with an ending underscore _).
  • .CAB cabinet files.
  • Stirling Technologies' InstallShield archives
  • NT FTP service recursive directory listing.
• Its own format under which it saves directory and file trees

Captain Nemo can connect to FTP sites and transfer files to and from them as if they were local archives. This is described below.

Parsing of all archive formats is handled internally. External tools are invoked to perform file extractions and other operations. FTP can be either built-in or use an external program.

Since Captain Nemo considers archives as sub-directories, it is possible to create empty archives just like one creates empty directories. Shift-F7 is used for that (this key combination was equivalent to F7 in previous versions and still is in native NC). ARC, ARJ, FTP, GZIP, LZH, RAR and ZIP formats are available. Newly created empty archives are not immediately mounted, but the selection bar is placed over them just like for ordinary directories.

To increase performance, and also to allow the operation of external commands on archived files, Captain Nemo maintains a cache of extracted files, located by default in %TMP%\nemo, %TEMP%\nemo or C:\nemo. You can change this location using F9/O/"Archive cache". This will unmount all archives beforehand. Do not try to manipulate the archive cache content directly using Captain Nemo when archives are still mounted. You can destroy the cache content, selectively or not, if it grows too big, once you have unmounted the archives, using F10/"Unmount all archives" or Alt-PageUp. The F12 key followed by F6 allows to clear the archive cache completely. Note: a subdirectory of the archive cache, named nemoslow is used to cache the directory trees of slow-extraction archive types, like FTP sites and compressed TAR files.

Invocations of external archiver programs are constructed according to the directions contained in the nemo-win.arv archiver file. This text file can be edited using any editor, notably using the F9/C/R key sequence. When the nemo-win.arv file is updated through F9/C/R, Captain Nemo automatically updates its internal tables after exiting from the editor. The format of the nemo-win.arv file is described later in this document.

See the separate chapter below on the level of support of each archive format.

Transparent FTP

Description

Resuming interrupted transfers

Support for proxies and firewalls

For example, NEMO_FTP_PROXY can be set to ftpproxy://myftpproxy:3000. The SET NEMO_FTP_PROXY=ftpproxy://myftpproxy:3000 command can be used to set the variable.

If you do not know the names of proxy servers on your network, ask a system administrator at your site, or look at how the other network programs are configured. You can use the information from the Socks line in Netscape's Manual Proxy Configuration dialog, if it is present and valid, to setup a socks4:// proxy description for Captain Nemo, and often you can use the information from the HTTP line to setup an https:// proxy URL.

socks5b servers are buggy socks5 servers, while socks4b servers are buggy socks4 servers. If you observe that Captain Nemo is unable to connect to any FTP server, and the vfsXXX.log log file located in the Captain Nemo archive cache directory (Captain Nemo automatically proposes to show it in many error circumstances) shows truncated welcome messages from them, with missing first 6 chars, use socks5b instead of socks5 and socks4b instead of socks4 to define the type of your proxy.

The proxy will be used only for machines whose name contains dots, for example ftp.cdrom.com. Machine names not containing dots, for example localftpserv are assumed to be on your local network and Captain Nemo will not go thru the proxy to access them.

Automatic creation of descriptions for transferred files

Creating FTP mount point files

Other settings

Password selection and on-line privacy

Today, as the Internet is getting more and more commercial, giving this information away can have several negative aspects for you, depending on how site hits are monitored:

• You may start getting additional junk e-mail, centered around the interests you have "expressed" when visiting the site.
• You allow to construct a profile of the people visiting a site. Noticing that a certain group of people comes back often while other very seldom may incite the owner of a site to switch to a subscription-based service for most interesting stuff.
• You will generally allow to monitor your on-line activity. From your e-mail address it is often possible to get your real name and first name, if the mail server of your ISP is poorly administered or if you post to Usenet.

  Even if you do not provide a valid e-mail address, there is still another way by which an Internet server may know who calls in: the ident protocol which allows to ask your machine about your login name. Your login name is often a valid e-mail address when appended with the name of your machine, and as said above, it often allows to get your real name.

Therefore you may want to keep the default -joe@ password for anonymous FTP connections. The leading - tells the FTP server to not send back any junk messages when for example a CD command is performed. Such messages are of no use to Captain Nemo but slow down communications. The @ trailer tells the FTP server that your e-mail hostname is the same as the hostname of your current machine. Providing it explicitely in the password may help speeding things up, if the server trusts you and does not check it, but of course if you are using dynamic IP number assignement on PPP/SLIP connections, then your hostname varies at each connection, the password will be wrong almost always and the FTP server might refuse access to you.

File attribute editing

• It is possible to edit the date and time of files and groups of files;
• You can see all other attributes associated with files:
  • All the streams composing a file, their types, names, and sizes. Streams can notably be Security Data, Alternate data streams (on NTFS only) and OS/2 Extended Attributes.

    Captain Nemo allows to access and to manipulate alternate data streams of NTFS files. If you do not know what alternate data streams of files are, try to create a file named nemo:mystream using the internal editor, then look at how it looks in a Directory Panel and in the file attribute editor.

  • For compressed files, on NTFS, their real disk usage is displayed too if different from the file size.
  • Creation and Last Access times. Note that on VFAT, the last access time is only a date. The last access time also gets reset to the current time at each usage of the dialog, so you can only see it once.
  • Full attribute bitmap.
  • The number of hard links for the file.
  • A file index, which uniquely identifies a file or directory on disk. Linked together files have the same index. On FAT, the file index appears to be composed of a directory-dependent number in the high-order bits, and of the entry offset in the low-order bits.
  • The serial number of the disk on which the file/directory resides.
• The dialog box is quickly accessible through the Alt-F11 hot key.
• Ctrl+cursor movement keys allow to slide the dialog over files in a directory
• Ctrl-Ins will tag the current file and reopen the dialog, still in single file mode.

Support for VFAT, NTFS, HPFS and long-name CD-ROMs

• There is a specific long names directory format for VFAT, NTFS and HPFS disks, allowing, in single line mode, up to 16 visible chars on 80-columns-wide displays and more if the display is wider (eg. 38 chars for 132 columns). In multi-line mode, which is the default now, Captain Nemo displays entire file names, writing them on as many lines as are necessary. It also cuts the beginning of file and directory names and replaces it with a single * character if they start with the name of the hosting directory.
  Note: VFAT is a backward-compatible extension of the FAT format, introduced in Windows 95 and Windows NT 3.5, which allows long Unicode filenames in addition to 8.3 filenames, and stores creation and last access dates for files and directories. Be aware that even when you just read diskettes on Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP, the system will update the last access date on the disk for each file you touch. Set the write protection tab on the diskette to avoid this.
• The mini-status can display more chars if necessary, 38 or 64.
• Directory panels can be put into a FAT-looking mode, where they put all-uppercase filenames to lowercase (F9/O/O).
• The CD-ROM directory format is similar, except that the FAT case convention is used: filenames are displayed in lower case and directory names in upper case.

Directory monitoring

The NoMonvariable in the [Main] section of the nemo-win.ini file can be set to the bitmap of drives for which monitoring is not desired. Typically, you would exclude both floppy drives (by setting NoMon to 3 and restarting Captain Nemo). Otherwise, if one or both panels show the content of diskettes, just moving the selection bar will wake the drive up, turning the light and the motor on.

Network drives are always excluded from monitoring, because enabling it causes serious lagging. CD-ROM drives are also excluded, even when they contain non-read-only media, because they also cause lagging in Captain Nemo when they are accessed from another process.

Customizable directory panel format

The default value is NS.

Short and long pathnames

• Captain Nemo can display either the normal long pathnames, or the short DOS compatible 8.3 pathnames in all panels. This can be toggled using F9/Commands/"Short pathnames" or using Alt-F5. Note that switching mode will unmount currently mounted archives.
• When you construct the nemo-win.ext extensions/associations file or the nemo-win.mnu user menu files, two additional ! escapes allow to select the proper pathname version, to be passed to external commands. Notably DOS and 16-bit Windows programs require short pathnames.

  Escape	Action
  !s	selects 8.3 file and directory names.
  !l	selects long names.

  HPFS disks do not support 8.3 shortcuts. Captain Nemo will pass long filenames in such cases.

descript.ion file handling

• Captain Nemo updates 4DOS, 4OS2 and 4NT descript.ion files with file descriptions as files are copied, moved, renamed or deleted. Blanks in file names and descriptions are supported and quoted as necessary.
• Descriptions can be shown in Directory panels, if the Custom format is selected, and the format string contains the P letter.
• Descriptions can have several lines, as long as the extra lines start with a blank. It is possible to have empty lines in the middle of the description, as long as there is a non-empty line at the end, otherwise the terminating empty lines will be stripped.
• descript.ion files are supported in archives and on FTP sites for all the above operations. For example, you can rename a file in an archive, and Captain Nemo will update the archived descript.ion file with the new name of the file.
• descript.ion files are visible in directory panels and can be viewed, edited, copied, moved or deleted. They cannot be tagged. They are invisible to all global file operations (except searches), as Captain Nemo updates their content by itself and asynchronously.
• Captain Nemo creates automatic descriptions for files imported from FTP sites and not yet having a description. See here for more detail.
• If Ctrl-Shift-PageDown is pressed in a Directory panel, descriptions are created for all files in the current directory which do not have one yet. These descriptions are the name of the directory.
• By default, Captain Nemo considers descriptions as precious information, and treats them slightly differently from other file attributes:
  • When a file not having a description is copied or moved into a directory which already has a description for this filename, the existing description is preserved rather than destroyed. In other words, the file inherits it.
  • When a file not having a description is renamed into a filename for which there is already a description, then the existing description is kept.
  This behavior can be controlled thru the KeepDescs variable in the [Vfs] section of the nemo-win.ini file. Setting this variable to zero will cause Captain Nemo to destroy existing descriptions in the two above cases. This avoids inheriting possibly unsuitable descriptions but increases the chances of inadvertently losing some.

  Note: if during a Copy/Move operation you overwrite a file having a description with another file also having a description, then the description of the overwriting file silently replaces the description of the overwritten file, whatever its comparative value might be.

Duplicate file finder

• Ctrl-F9 activates a duplicate file finder. It searches in the current directory and below for all files which either:
  • have exactly the same content, ie. are exact duplicates,
  • or derivate one from another, ie. start in the same way, but one is longer.
  After the analysis has terminated, Captain Nemo displays a list box with the groups of files it has found related. Groups are separated by lines. Within each group, a derivation tree is drawn, where identical or derived files are leafs of the original file. Identical files are sorted older first. At top level, if two files are identical, Captain Nemo will display them aligned, not derived.

  Captain Nemo first proposes a dialog box in order to allow selecting the desired processing options. It is possible to:

  • enable or disable the search for derivated files. It is disabled by default, because it slows the operations considerably and is not always necessary;
  • to specify whether archives should be searched through. This is disabled by default for the same reasons;
  • to only request that filenames following the provided pattern are taken into account, which speeds the search. The pattern uses the same inclusive/exclusive wildcards as in the other places in Captain Nemo. An empty pattern matches all files and is the default;
  • to define the external command which will be run over a group of related files if F5 is later pressed.

  After the search has completed a list box with the dependencies is displayed. It is possible to:

  Key	Command
  F2	Rescan the file tree
  F3	View the current file
  F4	Edit the current file
  F5	Run an external command, passing it the current group of identical files. This allows to perform arbitrary treatements on it. If some files are deleted by the external command, Captain Nemo removes them from the list. If less than two files remain in the group, Captain Nemo removes the whole group from the list. The external command receives as arguments: the count of all files in the list, a zero-based index of the current file in the list, and the list of file names itself. Filenames are absolute and quoted as necessary. If the list is too long, the command is not executed. The command is run in the same conditions in which archivers are run, ie. through the operating system's command processor and with all outputs redirected to nowhere. If you want to see the output of the command, you should perform your own redirection, eg. echo >log will simply echo its arguments (as described above) to the file named log.
  F8 Del	Delete either all tagged files if there are any, or only the current file. Captain Nemo will ask for confirmation first. After the deletion has completed, Captain Nemo will remove the file entries from the list and adjust the selection appropriatedly. If only one entry remains in a given group, this group is removed from the list.
  Ins	Tag the current file and move the selection bar to the next file. Tagged files appear in a different color. If there are some tagged files when the delete command is invoked, these files are deleted instead of the current file.
  F9	Revert back to top directory of tree, if you have exited from the finder (F10) and returned to it later while being in another directory.
  F10	Exit from the finder. Captain Nemo will ask whether the results should be kept in memory. Pressing Esc is equivalent to selecting Cancel . If the results are kept in memory, the next Ctrl-F9 will redisplay them, otherwise a new search will be proposed.
  letter	Move the selection bar to the next file whose name starts with letter.

• When using the feature, remember that because of end-of-file marks (ASCII character numbered 26, also named Ctrl-Z) on text files, which are stripped when another file is appended, some files might not appear as derived from each other, even if the longest one has been created from the shortest one, for example using the COPY A + B command.

  You should avoid as much as possible tools which append end-of-file marks, since these marks have been useless for a long time (they seem to be a reminiscence of DOS 1.0), yet they represent a data loss danger. Indeed, some tools will forget to strip them when concatenating text files, while other tools will stop reading a file if they encounter an EOF mark in the middle. You can easily lose what follows the mark by inadvertance.

  Note that Captain Nemo's internal editor does not care about end-of-file marks. When reading a non-binary file in, it strips all terminating marks (even if there are several of them, what seems to happen on files transferred with the X-Modem modem file transfer protocol), but keeps those in the middle. Therefore there are no more terminating marks when the file is saved. Some future version will probably also strip or warn about embedded end-of-line marks. You can find and remove them using the Editor's global replace command (Ctrl-Z can be entered if preceeded by Ctrl-Q).

Task switcher

• Captain Nemo offers a simple text mode task switcher, which allows to
  • visualize top-level windows. Captain Nemo displays the process identifier after each title.
  • switch to another window, or
  • kill a window nicely, using the DEL key over the entry, or
  • kill a window unconditionally, using the INS key.
  without passing through the Presentation Manager and its graphical mode.
• By default, the Task switcher will only display visible top-level windows, but if you press F1 while it is active, it will display even normally hidden one. On Windows NT, it will then complete the list with the names of processes not having separate windows or not having any window at all. Such processes cannot be switched to, but they can be killed with the INS key, except for a few system processes. Additionally, the name of the process owning each window is indicated in brackets behind the window name. This process display functionality requires having the pstat.exe utility, which is provided with Windows compilers. Versions 0.2 and 0.3 can be used.
• It refreshes itself every half second when idle, trying to keep the selection bar on the same entry.

Extended file attribute support

• On Windows NT, all extended file attributes follow owning files and directories when those are copied, moved or edited. Such attributes are for example alternate data streams (on NTFS only), OS/2 Extended Attributes, Windows security data or Posix attributes.

  Captain Nemo allows to create and edit alternate data streams. Look for an example in the File Attributes editing section.

• However, unless you use archivers able to handle EAs, it will not be possible to keep the attributes if you move files or directories into archives. Any Windows archiver can theoretically preserve all attributes, but none does at this time, not even ZIP/UNZIP. All serious OS/2 1.x archivers should at least preserve OS/2 EAs, but I have not verified this. Just like on OS/2, there is a performance penalty for using EAs on FAT/VFAT partitions.
• This does not presently work on Windows 95/98/ME, but if Microsoft implements the feature in some next version, Captain Nemo will automatically use it.

Quick view

• If the selection is scrolled onto an archive, instead of being displayed after a timeout, the archive is mounted and directory-like information (files, subdirs and bytes) is displayed for it.
• For ordinary directories, the Quick Panel also displays the size of the slack space wasted by files, and the percentage this makes of the total space occupied by files.
• For archives, the Quick Panel also displays:
  • the savings due to compression (Virt save) and
  • combined savings due to compression and slack elimination (Real save).

132 column display support

• Activated through Alt-F6 or F9/C/O. Captain Nemo tries to keep the current number of screen lines during this operation. Similarly, when you use Alt-F9 or F9/C/E to switch the number of lines on screen, Captain Nemo tries to keep the number of screen columns.
• If there is not enough screen real estate to have 132 columns, Captain Nemo will occupy the entire screen width, using as many columns as possible, enlarging the width of the filename columns. Starting from 100 columns of display space, Captain Nemo will use the wide directory panel format, which always displays the year in file dates.

Extension file (associations)

• It can have an unlimited length, while NC is limited to 30 entries. My nemo-dos.ext which I use with the DOS version of Captain Nemo has over 90 entries!
• Captain Nemo uses Unix-style wildcards. See the Wilcards section for details.
• There can be several commands associated with each extension.
• There are separate associations for Execution (nemo-win.ext), for Viewing (nemo-win.vie) and for Editing (nemo-win.edi).
• There are many additional escapes, which allow to pass much more context information to executed commands. Look for full list here and for examples in the provided nemo-win.ext file. Notably:
• Captain Nemo can re-use the Associations defined by Windows. You do not need to define associations for Captain Nemo separately.
• It is possible to invoke internal Captain Nemo functions, before and after running external commands. You can:
  • open a User Menu using any file.
  • run the Editor over any file.
  • run the Viewer over any file.
  This is used to implement file-specific viewers and sub-menus.
• Ctrl-PageDown allows to preview the command which will be executed if Enter (or Shift-Enter) is pressed over a file entry in a Directory Panel. The expanded command is put into the command line and the cursor is placed at the end of it. Note that if the entry is a directory, this directory will still be entered, and if the entry is an archive, this archive will be mounted and entered.

User menus

• Commands from the user menu are passed through the Extension File filter before execution. It is therefore possible to use all the ! escapes in order to insert variable parts into commands.
• Notably, the !M escape allows to put a Sub-Menu into a menu file.
• Commands executed from the user menu can be optionally echoed to the command history, for easy recall (for example using Ctrl-E) and re- execution after possible modification. This is enabled on a per-command basis by using a double semicolon (::) instead of a single semi- colon (:) as separator between command hotkey and command title. Eg.

  F2::	Make Default make -fmakefile	Note the double ::
  F10:	Reboot the machine reboot	Note the single :

• Ctrl-Enter allows to paste the menu command into the command line instead of directly executing it. Note: when several commands are associated with a menu entry only the first one is pasted.

Viewer

• allows to properly view Unix text files,
• offers a hex mode (F4),
• a prefix mode (F3) which displays control and non-printable bytes as ^X control sequences and is interesting for seeing tabulations, line terminations and for examining Unix terminal control sequences. I actually added this mode when developping the first Unix version of Captain Nemo.
• allows to append the current screen content to a file (F5),
• to copy an arbitrary portion of a viewed file into another file (Shift-F3, Shift-F4 and Shift-F5), and
• to go to an arbitrary offset in file (F6, Alt-F8).
• saves the position in the 16 last viewed files, so when they are viewed again, it brings them to the last position.
• files previously viewed can be re-opened from a list either from View itself (Alt-F3) or from the main screen (Shift-F12, F9/C/V).
• Alt-F5 shows the background behind panels. This allows to peek at the results of the last command.
• Shift combined with arrow keys allows to switch to another file in the current directory. Shift+Ins allows to tag the file and go to the next one.
• Alt-F4 allows to view the process memory. This is mostly useful on DOS. On VM systems, unreadable areas of memory appear filled with the 0xF6 character.

• The viewer can be set to an external executable (F9/O/V)
• The !* escape allows to pass it the list of tagged files in the current directory panel.

Note: be careful when using the viewer in a multi-tasking environment. When you view a file, this file is open and cannot be renamed or deleted until you stop viewing it. This might disturb the operation of another program using the file, if this program does not properly manage error conditions during renaming or deletion.

Editor

• File size and line lengths are only limited by the available virtual memory.
• Captain Nemo proposes to make a file writable and to retry if Save fails.
• Blocks can start and end in the middle of lines and are fully persistent once boundaries have been set: it is possible to edit the text inside and outside.
• The basic set of block commands is Wordstar/Borland compatible and based around the Ctrl-K escape, which does not kill till end of line like in NC editor and earlier Captain Nemo version anymore. Use Ctrl-K-N for that.
• All Shift+key block commands are now supported as well.
• A clipboard, either internal or the Windows one allows to move data between files, or to export/import to/from outside.
• Auto-indent mode with optimal fill (Alt-I).
• The position in 16 last edited files is saved and restored when one of these files is re-opened.
• Files previously edited can be re-opened either from Edit itself (Alt-F3) or from the main screen (Ctrl-F12, F9/C/A).

• Alt-F5 shows the background behind panels. This allows to peek at the results of the last command.
• Can insert this background into the edited text (Ctrl-K-M).
• Keybar can be disabled (Ctrl-B) to increase the number of visible lines. This setting is saved into the config file.
• Terminating EOF characters are stripped from files, even if there are several of them.
• Captain Nemo logs the pathnames of modified files to the nemo.mdf file by default. You can disable this by setting the Log variable to zero in the [View] section of the nemo-win.ini file and restarting Captain Nemo.
• Captain Nemo allows to edit any file, even binary ones, and notably preserves the line endings, even when they are mixed style.

  The Shift-F5 key bar entry shows the line ending style for the edited file. It can be:

  • Dos (carriage-return and new-line ASCII characters)
  • Unix (new-line ASCII characters)
  • Mac (carriage-return ASCII characters)
  • Binary if the file contains binary zeros (characters whose code is 0)
  • CR>NL (more carriage returns than newlines) or
  • NL>CR (more newlines than carriage returns) when line endings are inconsistent.

  Instead of showing EOL as the current character in the status line when the cursor is at line end, the editor now shows the line ending style, CR, NL, CRNL or NONE.

  The Shift-F6 key bar entry displays what Nemo will do when saving the file: keep line endings as they are (default behavior), or force a DOS, Unix or Mac format. The Shift-F6 key allows to toggle between these choices.

  New lines are added in the style selected with Shift-F9. It is possible to change the style dynamically, to create lines with mixed endings. The default style is the one of the file. If the file is binary or inconsistent, the default line endings are CR and NL on DOS, Windows and OS/2 and NL on Unix. The Shift-F9 key bar entry displays the current style.

• For Searching and/or Replacing, the editor maintains a clipboard of previously searched and/or replaced strings (ArrowDown). The word under the cursor is always available from this clipboard, so no retyping is required.

History

• History elimination is case-sensitive. For strange reasons, NC even in version 5.0 considers that for example /c and /C are the same option for a command and stores only one copy of it.
• It is possible to retain only one copy of each command in the history. In order to enable this, you need to set the Hist variable to 1 in the nemo-win.ini file after saving the configuration, then restart Captain Nemo so that the modification takes effect.

Directory panels

• They display long file and directory names on several lines.
• The Grey-Star key allows inverting the selection of files.
• F9/O/N toggles case-sensitive or insensitive sorting of files.
• Ctrl-F8 toggles the reverse mode for sorting.
• Ctrl-R can be made compatible with NC v.2 where it opens the Drive letter dialog (F9/O/D) instead of re-reading the directory.

• Shift-LeftArrow and Shift-RightArrow allow to select files (or rather to invert their selection status) like you would select lines in a CUA-compatible text editor. This is in addition to the Ins key. In many environments, the Shift-arrow keys have the advantage of being auto-repetitive, unlike the Ins key.

Last directories clipboard

• Captain Nemo saves the pathnames of the 16 last-visited dirs.
• It stores a directory if a file has been edited or viewed inside, or if a command has been executed there. It also stores the root dirs of all recently mounted archives.
• The clipboard is accessible through Alt-F12 or F9/C/D, titled Last directories, and can be used similarly to the command history (selection with cursor keys and by initial).

File operations

• Read-only attributes are not copied from CD-ROMs.
• In global operations, Captain Nemo proposes to overwrite All or None of subsequent files if it encounters one overwrite. It also proposes to delete or overwrite All read-only files whenever it encounters one read-only file.
• If portions of a file are unreadable, Captain Nemo will propose to either Retry the read, or Skip them or to fill them with Zeros, using a 512-byte granularity.
• If a file could not be successfully copied, the partial copy will be deleted.

File finder

• Can locate files in archives, based on name and content thanks to Nemo FS.
• Filenames to search for can be specified using complex wildcards.
• It is possible to restrict the search to a range of dates, a range of file sizes, and search through all drives.
• Results can be saved in a file.
• If the Persistent search result checkbox is checked, Captain Nemo will keep in memory the results of the last search. They can be recalled as many times as needed through the Shift-Alt-F7 key combination. Note that you can resize the screen in the meantime too.
• Captain Nemo disables the FTP, Unix ls(1), OS/2 FTP and Windows FTP archive format recognition during the search.

Command line

• Alt-Home and Ctrl-Alt-Enter paste the current directory name into command line.
• Shift-Enter executes the current line preceeded by a user-defined (F9/O/H) prefix, "start " by default.
  This is also valid for executing extensions/associations-defined commands. Shift-Enter over a non-executable filename will first construct the command according to the directive in the extensions/associations file, then execute it with the prefix.
• Captain Nemo catches all CD , X: and SET variable[=value] operations performed on the command line and interprets them internally. CD... acts like CD ..\..
• Captain Nemo fully manages the quoting of file and directory names when you are pasting them into the command line. It will extend the quoting backward if necessary, for example when you are pasting a file name just behind an option switch. If also extends the quoting forward if you are pasting something just behind quoted text. You can construct command lines entirely blindly.
• Ctrl-Enter never completes the current command given the past history, and always pastes the current panel entry into the line. Use Shift-Ctrl-Enter to complete the command line using history.
• Ctrl-^ changes the current directory to the one indicated by the HOME environment variable. Note that on non-US keyboards this key combination may vary. Try Ctrl-6 first.
• It is possible to adjust the space available on the command line for entering commands. Captain Nemo cuts the displayed current directory name so that there remains at least 20 chars, but you can change this value by editing the Prompt variable in the [Main] section of the nemo-win.ini file and restarting Captain Nemo. Whatever you enter is automatically adjusted so that there is always at least 1 char for user input, and at least 1 char for the directory name.

Tree panels and NCD

Trees are always displayed (and saved on disk) sorted, either case- sensitively or case-insensitively, depending on the F9/O/N option.

Directory trees of CD-ROMs or read-only diskettes are cached on the hard disk, so as to allow operation of tree panels and NCD with these media, without re-reading the disk all the time as NC does. You do not need to have treeinfo.ncd files on CD-ROMs for proper Tree operation with them.

The file containing the directory tree information is kept hidden. It is also named nemo-win.tre and not treeinfo.ncd, since its format is different. nemo-win.tre files are considered as archive types, similar to directory listings, and can therefore be entered and walked.

Changing the current directory with Captain Nemo

Disk status panel

1. All mounted archives (if any).
2. Monitored files inside each mounted archive (if any).
3. Overview information about all drives in the system.
   • letter (A: to Z:)
   • drive type (Removable, Fixed, Network, CD-ROM, RAM-disk)
   • file system on drive (FAT, VFAT, HPFS, NTFS, CDFS)
   • total capacity in kilo-bytes
   • available capacity in kilo-bytes
   • cluster size in bytes
   • disk label (if any)
   • attachment information. This information is only displayed if available and varies by disk type. It can be either the physical disk number and the partition number, written in an operating system dependent way, or the name of a remote server and the exported resource name.

Backscroll buffer of command output

Symbolic links emulation

Software-only symbolic links are handled for internal file viewing, internal file editing, file copying/moving and searching through files. For other operations, symbolic links appear just like files containing a signature allowing to recognize them (!<symlink>), followed by the path where the symbolic link points to, followed by a NUL ASCII character. If the pointed path is absolute, it is used as-is. If it is relative, it is considered relative to the directory hosting the symbolic link. If you want to see what is in a symbolic link file, use the TYPE command-line command for the file.

By default, the handling of these links is enabled. If you feel you have no use of them and want to save some time, you can disable the handling by editing the nemo-win.ini file, going to section [Vfs], setting the SymLinks variable to zero, saving the file and restarting Captain Nemo.

Some patches to GNU-Win32 change the implementation of symbolic links, which are then marked with the System attribute. Since Captain Nemo by default hides both Hidden and System files, symbolic links would then not be visible except if all files are visible. Therefore, there is a new setting, HidSys in the [Main] section of the nemo-win.ini file, which allows to change this behavior. The default value of 1 hiddes System files, while setting this variable to zero makes only Hidden files invisible. If you use the new implementation of symbolic links, you will want to set HidSys to zero.

Note that symbolic links are only recognized as such when at the end of a pathname. Using relative symbolic links does not extend the maximum allowable pathname length (259 characters). Only links to files are presently supported. Captain Nemo will follow up to 128 links in order to reach a file and will detect circular references. Emulated symbolic links are not marked as such in directory panels, since this would require opening and reading many files in a directory when entering it. Using a specific naming convention which would allow to limit the number of files to test is not compatible with the way GNU-Win32 handles links and the idea that Captain Nemo will be mostly used for walking through GNU-Win32 file trees.

Actually, I think that GNU-Win32 should have used special filenames for symbolic links, for example starting with an @ or a comma, and allowing to easily distinguish them from real files and real directories by simple pathname examination, and embed the externally visible name inside. Even the location where the link points to could be embedded in the filename, with appropriate mangling. This would give something like @linkname,where-it-points-to. Some people might have already started modifying GNU-Win32 in this or a similar direction.

Hard links support

A hard link, sometimes confusingly called hard symbolic link in Microsoft documentation, is an alias file name for a file, and is handled by the operating system itself, for all disk operations. The hard link (or alias file name) can be located anywhere on the same physical disk partition.

Only Windows NT supports hard links, only on NTFS partitions, and it is only possible to have a link to file, not to a directory. Note that some Unix systems (like SunOS) support hard links to directories, but only the system administrator can create them, since they can be a major source of confusion, for example when they link to one of their own parent directories or even to themselves!

Hard links are officially only supported for Posix programs, but it is possible to use them with all programs on Windows NT. Note that modifying a file thru one of its names does not immediately modify its attributes visible through the other names, due to per-directory caching of file information, but the file data is always coherent.

Directory comparing

• The Size variable in the [Panes] section of the nemo-win.ini file can be set to zero in order to make Captain Nemo stop comparing file sizes.
• The Comp variable in the [Panes] section of the nemo-win.ini file can be set to zero in order to make Captain Nemo stop comparing file content.

Wildcards

Unix-style wildcards are a superset of the other types of wildcards, and allow notably ranges of characters. For example, a mask of *[a-k]*.mak will match all filenames having .mak as extension and containing at least one letter between a and k, inclusive. Unlike on Unix, matching is done case-insensitively.

It is possible to specify several masks at the same time, and also to exclude specific masks. Multiple masks must be separated by a space character. If a mask is supposed to be exluded rather than included, it must start with either ! or ~. Exclusions must be specified first. A file name matches a complete mask if it matches any inclusive sub-mask and doesn't match any exclusive sub-mask. Eg. a mask of ~[a-c]* *.[ch] will match dirs.h and edit.c but neither arch.h nor colors.c. There should be at least one inclusive mask or the pattern will not match any file.

Complex masks can be entered in all places where wildcards can be specified:

• When copying, moving or deleting files by mask: Shift-F5, Shift-F6 and Shift-F8
• When defining a filter for Directory panels: F9/L or R/L
• When tagging or untagging files by mask: Grey-Plus, Grey-Minus or Grey-Star
• In the extensions/associations files.
• When searching for files: Alt-F7

If you need to select or exclude filenames starting with the reserved ! or ~ characters, enclose them into brackets: [!] or [~]. It is not yet possible to put blanks into the masks.

Various

• It is possible to allow full type-ahead by setting the Ahead variable in the [Main] section of the nemo-win.ini file to 1. By default, Captain Nemo flushes the available keyboard input just after displaying a message box.

Captain Nemo commands

Line editor commands

Cursor movement

Deletion

Insertion

Command line

History

Deletion

Interaction with clipboard

Change directory shortcuts

Action	Command
cd..	Ctrl-PageUp
cd selecteddir	Ctrl-PageDn
cd \	Ctrl-\
cd %HOME%	Ctrl-^

Interaction with panels

Panel control

Internal commands

Command	Action
X:	Change the current drive to X.
cd..	Go to upper directory.
cd...	Go 2 levels up.
cd\	Go to root directory.
cd cd.	Display the current directory.
cd dir	Change to dir.
exit	Exit from Captain Nemo.
set var[=value]	Set the var environement variable to value value. If the new value is not provided then just display the value of the variable. When setting the values of environment variables, you can access the existing variables through the %variable-name% notation.
md [/type] dir mkdir [/type] dir	Create an archive of type type. type is a single letter, the same as the ones used in the nemo-win.arv file to identify archive types. For example, to create an empty ZIP file, one would use mkdir /Z name.

File editor

Deletion

Edition

Action	Command
Split current line. The Shift-F9 key decides about the line ending for the new line.	Enter Shift-Enter
Quote next char. This allows to enter chars which would otherwise be perceived as control chars.	Ctrl-Q
Lowercase current char, move cursor right.	Alt-L
Uppercase current char, move cursor right.	Alt-U
Uppercase initials, lowercase the rest, move cursor right.	Alt-T
Invert case of current char, move cursor right.	Alt-V
Force line ending style. Line endings are preserved by default, even if they are inconsistent. This key allows to force them all into either the DOS, the Mac or the Unix format.	Shift-F6

Setting current line

Searching and replacing

Other

Multi-file support

Block operations

Action	Command
Start block	Ctrl-K-B Shift-SomeArrowKey
End block	Ctrl-K-K Shift-SomeArrowKey
Mark word as block	Ctrl-K-T
Copy block	Ctrl-K-C
Delete block	Ctrl-K-Y Ctrl-Del
Move block	Ctrl-K-V
Indent block	Ctrl-K-I
Un-indent block	Ctrl-K-U
Hide block	Ctrl-K-H
Copy block to clipboard	Ctrl-Ins
Copy block from clipboard	Shift-Ins
Move block to clipboard	Shift-Del
Read file as new block into text	Ctrl-K-R
Write block to file	Ctrl-K-W
Take background screen snapshot and insert it into file as block	Ctrl-K-M

File viewer

Text movement commands

Multi-file support

Search

Formats

Other

Menu bar

The menu bar is activated through the F9 or Ctrl-N keys. The default menu is marked in black, and can be opened (dropped-down) by pressing Enter or ArrowDown. Another menu can be selected by pressing the initial of its name, or by using the Arrow keys to move the selection to it and pressing Enter or ArrowDown. A menu is closed by the Esc key. A second Esc will deactivate the menu bar.

The Menu Bar can be made permanently visible. Edit the nemo-win.ini file, set the Visi variable in the [Main] section to 1 and restart Captain Nemo. Later this might become a dynamic configuration option, like in NC.

Inside a menu it is possible to select an option or a command by moving the selection bar to it and pressing Enter. If a letter is highlighted in the entry label (yellow in Color or Windowed modes), then this letter can be used. The mouse can be used too. If a menu command can be accessed through a hotkey as well, which is marked on the right, then this hotkey can be used as well to select the entry from the menu.

Once a command has been selected from a menu, it is possible to re-open the menu and select the same command using Shift-F10.

Left and Right menus

Files menu

Commands menu

Options menu

Hotkeys

For each hotkey, the equivalent menu entry is displayed if it exists. For more detailed explanations of commands which appear in a menu, please refer to the Menu Bar chapter.

Bare function keys

Alted function keys

Shifted function keys

Ctrl function keys

Ctrl-letter keys

Other keys

System hotkey

Key	Action
F1	(Task switcher) Display all top-level windows, even hidden ones.
F2	(Task switcher) Display only the normally visible top-level windows. This is the default action of F12.
F3	Display the System Info box.
F4	Display allocated memory blocks detail. This command only exists in debug versions of Captain Nemo.
F5	Display the allocated memory map. This command only exists in debug versions of Captain Nemo.
F6	Clear the Captain Nemo archive cache. Captain Nemo will ask for a confirmation before proceeding.
F7	Restore the cursor to startup shape. Use this command if some command you executed has changed the cursor size and you do not like this.
F8	Cause a failed assert in Captain Nemo. This command only exists in debug versions of Captain Nemo.
F9	Identical to Alt-PageDown. Displays the Disk Status panel.
F10	Quit the system menu.
F11	Display the list of open files. This command only exists in debug versions of Captain Nemo.

Directory panels

When a drive supports long names, Captain Nemo switches to a slightly different panel layout, which displays more of the file name and stops separating the extension from the base name. It also colors the directory entries as green, since they cannot be easily distinguished by case anymore. The date/time information is shortened, and either time or year information is displayed alternatively, depending on whether the file is less than 6 months old or more. The time information is always displayed using the 24-hour format, since this allows to always fit it in a 5-chars width. This panel type automatically enlarges itself when the screen width increases. Starting with 100 column screen width, the full format is used, which again always shows full date and time for each entry. Captain Nemo allocates at most half of the screen width to each panel.

The names of file entries are lowercased on FAT disks, except for the first letter if the file is Hidden or System. Directory names are left uppercase. On long name disks, directory case is again unchanged. However the case of displayed files is either left unmodified, or dynamically adjusted to the nicest form if the F9/Options/"Drives look FAT" option is toggled. If this option is On, then all-uppercase filenames are lowercased, while mixed name and lowercase filenames are left unmodified.

The Size column displays variable information about the entries:

Displayed	Meaning
Number	For file entries, the file size is displayed. If the size if over 999999999 bytes, then it is displayed as kilo-bytes and postfixed with a K. For directories for which the contained files' size has been computed, this size is displayed. Only the green color allows to distinguish them from file entries.
UP--DIR	For parent directories (..).
SUB-DIR	For ordinary directories.
F-LINK	For symbolic links to files. This is only supported on certain operating systems, for selected partition/filesystem types, or in certain archive types, tar(1), FTP, UNIX ls(1) directory listing, ZIP.
D-LINK	For symbolic links to directories. Same remark as for F-LINK.
ARCHIVE	For mounted archives.
MISSING	For incomplete directories inside archives, ie. directories whose content Captain Nemo does not yet know since you have not entered them (FTP) or directories mentioned but not detailed in directory listings. Missing directories are therefore always empty if you try to enter them and Captain Nemo is unable to complete them.
VIRTUAL	For virtual directories you have temporarily created in archives not fully supporting empty real directorie