[ This has now been released as Shareware, but it's such a great Directory
    Utility that I thought I'd leave this in, just so you can find out a bit
    more about it.  I MUCH prefer it to OPUS. ]

                                     *
   
  This is a terrific directory utility, and I've tried 'em all.  It's not
perfect; none of them are, but it's A-1 in my book.  I'm going to grant
quickly that DU's are very personal things, and everyone wants something
different from them, so this isn't going to be a comparison.  Not against 
the mob of PD DU's, nor against the much-heralded OPUS.  This is just a nice
DU and I like it.

  Well, first off, forgive me, but it's pretty.  Talking 8-color here, 16
slows things down too much.  It's just pleasant to look at, what can I say?
And, I gotta admit, after five years of using the Interlace mode, SID's non-
interlaced screen is real pleasant to the eye.  The listings in the windows
scroll real fast with the mouse, so I don't mind them being "half-sized",
compared to the interlace set-up.  It does interlace, of course, but then 
you're back to that jittery routine.

  Customizing is what a smart DU is all about, and this thing can be
customized like crazy.  You have the click boxes down below, and pull-down
menus from above for running separate tools and things.

  The pull-downs are really nice; they allow you to have sub-menus.  One of
my menus has four options; Audio, Graphics, Notepad and Term, and from those
I can fire up any of my major programs.  I have one menu that executes a
bunch of different scriptfiles, mainly for SysOp work.  It'll do things like
copy certain files over to Ram or pop open an Ed window for a new file in Ram
called ReadMeToo.  You can also execute scriptfiles that open NewCLI windows
just where you want them; I have one pop open on the lower left that's CD
Ram, on the lower right is CD dh0.

  The click boxes below can be configured two very nice ways.  First, you can
make a row of boxes half-sized, so you get twice as many, which is just
perfect for devices and directories.  You can only fit three letters in them,
but that's all you need.  That saves all kinds of room, so you can have more
regular command boxes.  

  When you run a command on a file, you can pop open a CLI window to see
what's taking place, or not.  You can have the CLI window stay open after-
wards, or close right away.  You can have it reload the directory after
you're done, or not.  I really miss that feature in other DU's; sometimes I
really want it to reload the dir after, like, editing a file, so I can see
what the new file size is, but with other commands it seems ridiculous, so
this part of it was well done.  Actually, you have lots of control over each
command box, as much as you'll want.  It's smart enough to run commands that
need variables, which is a feat unto itself, given some of the oddball
configurations you run into.  It has a bunch of built-in commands, like Show,
Play, Read, etc, but you'll probably want to use about half of your own.  No
sweat, it seems to handle everything with ease.

  Second, you get two panels of boxes.  You might have 40 boxes on one side,
then just click anywhere in the box area with the right mouse button, and
you've got 40 more.  If you're using, say, the top row for devices and dirs,
then those would stay the same, but everything else would be different.
Since I'm a SysOp, I do a lot of testing, so my front panel is kind of a
Workbench/CLI testing ground, and the flip side is an audio/graphics lab.

  For what it's worth, you can have 100 boxes on a side, 200 total.

  One of the best things about SID is that when you're copying or dir'ing
files, a small stop/pause box appears, so you can quickly stop or pause the
process.  If you want to copy a file to a large dir, you hit the button for
the dir, or double-click the screen, then instead of waiting for the whole
dir to display, you hit the Stop box, then copy the file over.  No mess, no
fuss, no timely wait.  If for some reason you just want to pause things for a
minute, like, if you're copying a large file to your bulletin board via the
parnet cable, and somebody happens to call at that very moment...that
option's there, too. :)

  A small trick:  since I've got mem to burn, I load up a bunch of the tools
and commands I use with SID, like CygnusEd, Less, LHA, a few c commands,
NewCLI, whatever, and toss them into a drawer tucked away on RAD.  Then I
make SID run those commands instead of from the drive.  Makes the whole thing
lightning-quick.  Since they're in Rad, they'll survive a warm boot, and the
next time I run the scriptfile that fires up SID, it'll test to see if the
files are in Rad, and skip over that part if they are.

  You can Run any command, program or text viewer, of course, so you can
continue to operate the DU.  As you can see, you can end up with just all
kinds of windows and programs and things up..it's really kind of it's own
little world in a way.  As I once said in a message, a directory utility is
a "tool".  SID and OPUS are "systems".



  Well, that's a quick run-down on this excellent DU.   Enjoy!




%Z