filemgr

filemgr showed a directory as icons in an XView window with a clickable path at the top and a Goto field for jumping straight somewhere. It was the hub of DeskSet: a file dragged onto mailtool became an attachment, onto printtool a print job, onto Text Editor an open document, and onto Wastebasket, its own trash window, a file that stayed until you emptied it. Which icon a file got and what a double-click launched was decided not by the extension but by the Classing Engine, the OpenWindows type database, which looked at magic bytes and name patterns and was edited with a tool called binder.

It was a well-thought-out system for 1990, and CDE's dtfile inherited both the ideas and most of the concepts, with data types in .dt files instead of the Classing Engine. What did not carry over was the look: OPEN LOOK's rounded buttons and pushpins gave way to Motif's grey bevels, and a fair number of Sun users clung to OpenWindows well into Solaris 2 precisely because filemgr felt faster than its successor.