Servant Salamander

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Servant Salamander

Screenshot of Servant Salamander 2.5
Developer:	ALTAP
Latest release:	2.5 RC2 / October 27, 2006
OS:	Microsoft Windows
Use:	Orthodox file manager
License:	Proprietary
Website:	www.altap.cz

Servant Salamander is a fast and powerful two-pane (also known as orthodox) file manager for Windows, originally inspired by Norton Commander. In contrast to several other file managers, it has a context aware user interface hiding complexity - for instance, the bottom function list changes on press of modifier keys, just showing the currently available hotkey function set.

Its development was started in 1996 as a hobby project by Petr Solin (from Czech Republic) during his studies at university and released as a freeware in 1997. It was originally written in Watcom C++, later in Microsoft Visual C++. The last freeware version, 1.52, is still available for download and is a portable (stand-alone) application popular for its speed, small size and extensive functionality.

The first shareware version 2.0 was released in 2001 by a newly established company Altap Ltd. with new extensible plugin architecture which in later versions allowed easy addition of support for virtually all graphics file formats, archive formats, FTP, SFTP, SCP (based on WinSCP) and much more.

Some examples of features implemented in a more sophisticated way than in other file managers:

Sophisticated batch renaming including regular expressions, a lot of fields like path substring etc.
Selection management including
- add/substract/intersect with 1...N stored selections
- selection from within picture viewer and inside viewer jumping to next selected file
- showing only selected files and hide unselected ones
The handling of directory navigation, eg. "hot paths", "go"-Menu,...
History of recently viewed paths, opened files,...
Refined/iterative searches. For example the ability to finish one search and then perform a new search a) only within these results (intersect the two result sets / the requirements of both searches have to be met), 2) adding to these results (combine both result sets to a bigger set) or 3) substract from those results (original result set reduced by intersection of result sets).