Open Salamander

Open Salamander is a fast and reliable two-panel file manager for Windows.

Origin

The original version of Servant Salamander was developed by Petr Šolín during his studies at the Czech Technical University. He released it as freeware in 1997. After graduation, Petr Šolín founded the company Altap in cooperation with Jan Ryšavý. In 2001 they released the first shareware version of the program. In 2007 a new version was renamed to Altap Salamander 2.5. Many other programmers and translators contributed to the project. In 2019, Altap was acquired by Fine. After this acquisition, Altap Salamander 4.0 was released as freeware. In 2023, the project was open sourced under the GPLv2 license as Open Salamander 5.0.

The name Servant Salamander came about when Petr Šolín and his friend Pavel Schreib were brainstorming name for this project. At that time, the well-known file managers were the aging Norton Commander and the rising Windows Commander. They questioned why a file manager should be named Commander, which implied that it commanded instead of served. This thought led to the birth of the name Servant Salamander.

Please bear with us as Salamander was our first major project where we learned to program in C++. From a technology standpoint, it does not use C++ Core Guidelines, smart pointers, RAII, STL, or WIL, all of which were just beginning to evolve during the time Salamander was created. Historically, many comments were written in Czech. However, an active community effort is translating the codebase to English to improve accessibility for international contributors. Salamander is a pure WinAPI application and does not use any frameworks, such as MFC.

We would like to thank Fine company for making the open sourced Salamander release possible.

Open Salamander 5.0 Updates

The 5.0 release marks a transition to open development with several key enhancements:

• UI Modernization: Introduced high-quality SVG icons for toolbars, replacing legacy bitmaps for better scaling on modern displays.
• Performance Breakthroughs:
  • Asynchronous Loading: File icons are now loaded using a dedicated thread pool, significantly speeding up directory browsing.
  • Optimized I/O: Local-to-local file operations now use a 1MB buffer to minimize system calls and improve throughput.
  • Memory Management: Refined memory allocation strategies specifically for Unicode string handling.
• Enhanced Unicode Support: Comprehensive fixes for Unicode handling in window titles, file execution, and viewer outputs, ensuring full compatibility with international filenames.
• Codebase Internationalization: We are systematically translating legacy Czech comments into English (// CommentsTranslationProject: TRANSLATED) to foster a global contributor community.
• Reliability: Addressed critical threading issues, fixed "Access Denied" errors in worker threads, and resolved stability bugs in directory refreshing.

Development

Prerequisites

• Windows 11 or newer
• Visual Studio 2022
• Desktop development with C++ workload installed in VS2022
• Windows 11 (10.0.26100.4654) SDK optional component installed in VS2022

Optional requirements

• Git

• PowerShell 7.4 or newer

• HTMLHelp Workshop 1.3

• Set the OPENSAL_BUILD_DIR environment variable to specify the build directory. Make sure the path has a trailing backslah, e.q. D:\Build\OpenSal\

Building

Solution \src\vcxproj\salamand.sln may be built from within Visual Studio or from the command-line using \src\vcxproj\rebuild.cmd.

Use \src\vcxproj\!populate_build_dir.cmd to populate build directory with files required to run Open Salamander.

Creating SFX Installer

To create a standalone self-extracting installer (EXE) for distribution:

1. Prepare files: Ensure the Instalator directory contains the latest build of salamand.exe, salmon.exe, and other required files.
2. Run the script: Use the provided PowerShell script in the tools directory.

# Run from the project root
.\tools\Create-Sfx.ps1 -SourceDir "Instalator" -OutputPath "OpenSalamander_Setup.exe"

The script automatically:

• Compiles a C# bootstrap (stub) for extraction.
• Includes the latest SVG icons from src\res\toolbars.
• Modifies setup.inf (internally in the package) if necessary to ensure icons are installed.
• Produces a single OpenSalamander_Setup.exe.

Customization

Icons

Open Salamander uses scalable SVG icons for its toolbars.

• Location: src\res\toolbars
• Format: Standard SVG
• Dimensions: The standard viewbox is 16x16 pixels.
• Process: To add or update an icon, simply place the .svg file in the src\res\toolbars directory. The build scripts (!populate_build_dir.cmd for local dev and Create-Sfx.ps1 for installer) will automatically include them.

Execution Logging

The execution logging system runs only in DEBUG builds. It records major application execution paths (startup, plugin loading, directory listing, file operations, and key UI features) through the Trace system. The logs are emitted as TRACE messages, so they appear in the Trace Server when it is connected. In release builds, the logging calls are compiled out and produce no output.

Contributing

This project welcomes contributions to build and enhance Open Salamander!

Repository Content

\convert         Conversion tables for the Convert command
\doc             Documentation
\help            User manual source files
\src             Open Salamander core source code
\src\common      Shared libraries
\src\common\dep  Shared third-party libraries
\src\lang        English resources
\src\plugins     Plugins source code
\src\reglib      Access to Windows Registry files
\src\res         Image resources
\src\salmon      Crash detecting and reporting
\src\salopen     Open files helper
\src\salspawn    Process spawning helper
\src\setup       Installer and uinstaller
\src\sfx7zip     Self-extractor based on 7-Zip
\src\shellext    Shell extension DLL
\src\translator  Translate Salamander UI to other languages
\src\tserver     Trace Server to display info and error messages
\src\vcxproj     Visual Studio project files
\tools           Minor utilities
\translations    Translations into other languages

A few Altap Salamander 4.0 plugins are either not included or cannot be compiled. For instance, the PictView engine pvw32cnv.dll is not open-sourced, so we should consider switching to WIC or another library. The Encrypt plugin is incompatible with modern SSD disks and has been deprecated. The UnRAR plugin lacks unrar.dll, and the FTP plugin is missing OpenSSL libraries. Both issues are solvable as both projects are open source. To build WinSCP plugin you need Embarcadero C++ Builder.

All the source code uses UTF-8-BOM encoding and is formatted with clang-format. Refer to the \normalize.ps1 script for more information.

Resources

• Altap Salamander Website
• Altap Salamander 4.0 features
• Altap Salamander 4.0 documentation
• Servant Salamander and Altap Salamander changelogs
• User Community Forum
• Altap Salamander on Wikipedia

License

Open Salamander is open source software licensed GPLv2 and later. Individual files and libraries have a different, but compatible license.