Tuesday, December 4, 2012

Windows 8 Copy Dialogue Box

The only thing I care for in Windows 8 is that nice new copy dialog. I like it very much. It is very pretty and slick.


It shows you in real time the progress of the copies. The graph is pretty cool and shows you the up and down progress. Lot of people will rave about how cool it is and how innovative Microsoft has done with Windows 8.

Unfortunately, this is not new.

It may be built into the OS but the implementation and concepts are not new. I've been doing this for a few years now; using muCommander.  muCommander is an old-school norton like mc file manager (Midnight commander) that is cross-platform. I've been running it under OSX and Linux for years.


I also like the ability to pause /resume my copies and limit the speed with muCommander.
There was also iStat on OSX but that no longer works on Mountain Lion.

You can get similar verbosity in the command line with Rsync. Rsync (by default) won't give a graph but it will give you everything else you need. Like all POSIX cli tools, you can pipe rsync and output to an external log for post analysis. Rsync is great at giving real stats when it comes to viewing sequential and random copies (both small and large). If you are good with regex/grep, I bet one can grep and pipe a 3D overlay graph, generate a PDF report using rsync with ImageMagick/Ghostscript. If you now Python, you can generate an .xlsx Excel file of your copy.



Regardless of who had it first, I still think it is a cool feature. They should implement this natively on other operating systems in the GUI's File Managers. Or use muCommander!

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