Looking through Asimov, you kind of have to go by file name and guess if the file is what you are looking for.
On csa2 there was one direct suggestion, so I downloaded that one, select10.gz, to try out.
It’s on a bootable disk which requires an 80 column card. It comes up with a clean display listing the files on the disk in three columns and a forth column lists available commands. Across the top is the program name and disk space information and at the bottom is a place for messages.
You use the arrows to highlight the file you want and the command from the right column to perform an operation. This program allows you to change ProDOS volumes, lock/unlock files, rename and delete files.
Of course, it allows you to open files. Opening a program just runs it, but opening a TXT file is where it seems to fall apart. I selected the on disk documentation SELECTOR.DOCS TXT and got a ?SYNTAX ERROR which appears to be caused by the program EXECing the text file. With out digging too far, I listed the program after the syntax error and there were new lines added to the beginning that looked like chapter headings.
I loaded AppleWorks and then added SELECTOR.DOCS to the desktop as a word processing document. Sure enough section 5.2 on opening a file says if the file type is BAS, BIN, TXT or SYS it will be EXECed. It futher warns bad things happen if the file is not really meant to be run.
Personally, I would prefer that if the file was of type text, it was opened and displayed on the screen. This would allow you to read on disk notes and documentation.
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