Open Salamander is a fast, reliable, dual-pane file manager for Windows.
The original version of Servant Salamander was developed by Petr Šolín while he was studying at the Czech Technical University. He released it as freeware in 1997. After graduating, Petr Šolín founded Altap together with Jan Ryšavý. In 2001, they released the first shareware version of the program. In 2007, the project was renamed Altap Salamander with the release of version 2.5. Many other programmers and translators have contributed to the project over the years. In 2019, Altap was acquired by Fine. After the acquisition, Altap Salamander 4.0 was released as freeware. In 2023, the source code was released under the GPLv2 license as Open Salamander 5.0.
The name Servant Salamander came from a brainstorming session between Petr Šolín and his friend Pavel Schreib. At the time, the best-known file managers were the aging Norton Commander and the increasingly popular Windows Commander. They wondered why a file manager should be called a commander at all: a good file manager serves its users rather than commands them. That idea led to the name Servant Salamander.
Salamander was our first major C++ project, and the code reflects both that learning process and the era in which it was built. It does not follow the C++ Core Guidelines, use smart pointers, rely on RAII, or use libraries such as the STL or WIL. Most of these practices and libraries were still emerging when Salamander was created. Many comments are still written in Czech, but recent advances in AI-assisted translation make them much easier to improve incrementally. Salamander is a pure WinAPI application and does not use application frameworks such as MFC.
We would like to thank Fine for making the open-source release of Salamander possible.
- 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
- Git
- PowerShell 7.4 or newer
- HTMLHelp Workshop 1.3
- Set the
OPENSAL_BUILD_DIRenvironment variable to specify the build directory. The path must include a trailing backslash, for exampleD:\Build\OpenSal\.
You can build the \src\vcxproj\salamand.sln solution in Visual Studio or from the command line with \src\vcxproj\rebuild.cmd.
Use \src\vcxproj\!populate_build_dir.cmd to populate the build directory with the files required to run Open Salamander.
Contributions that help build, maintain, and improve Open Salamander are welcome.
\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 Plugin source code
\src\reglib Access to Windows Registry files
\src\res Image resources
\src\salmon Crash detection and reporting
\src\salopen Open files helper
\src\salspawn Process spawning helper
\src\setup Installer and uninstaller
\src\sfx7zip Self-extractor based on 7-Zip
\src\shellext Shell extension DLL
\src\translator Tools for translating the Salamander UI into other languages
\src\tserver Trace server for displaying information and error messages
\src\vcxproj Visual Studio project files
\tools Minor utilities
\translations Translations into other languages
Some Altap Salamander 4.0 plugins are either not included or cannot currently be compiled. For example, the PictView engine, pvw32cnv.dll, is not open source, so the project should eventually move to WIC or another image library. The Encrypt plugin is incompatible with modern SSDs and has been deprecated. The UnRAR plugin is missing unrar.dll, and the FTP plugin is missing the OpenSSL libraries. Both issues are solvable because both projects are open source. Building the WinSCP plugin requires Embarcadero C++ Builder.
All source files use UTF-8 with BOM and are formatted with clang-format. See \normalize.ps1 for details.
- 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
Two interesting Open Salamander forks are Sally by 0xeb and Samandarin by KRtekTM.
Open Salamander is open-source software licensed under GPLv2 or later. Some individual files and libraries use different but compatible licenses.