some feature suggestions/changes & bugs

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Leeoniya
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some feature suggestions/changes & bugs

Post by Leeoniya »

xplorer2 comes close to being the perfect replacement for me. i do have several quibbles (most pertaining to dual pane operation):

Location/Address/Command bar:
- in dual pane mode, this bar should split into 2 bars, one for each view.

DOS prompt:
- should be split from the location bar, and should be split between each view...most usefully positioned at the bottom of each view. also perhaps make it multiline and display output right inside the multiline, like regular cmd prompt.

Pane titlebar:
- this should retain the full path even when a higher level directory is clicked, allowing quick navigation back to the more deeply nested folder. technically this can be accoplished by Forward/Back, but i'd like to see the full path retained for quick jumps. (maybe clear deeper paths on doubleclick?)

Bookmarks:
- adding/managing bookmarks is currently a painful process indeed, there should be a way to create bookmarks manually without having to navigate to the location first. especially since a lot of bookmarks may be specified in terms of CLSID or environment variables (which almost always requires manual editing after adding them)

- there should exist a bookmarks toolbar by default without the need to create it manually. (not sure how this was overlooked)

Toolbars:
- the toolbars need to have the ability to align to each view independently when in dual pane mode because it is very inefficient to mouse over to the left side of the screen to click a toolbar button designed to operate while the right side is active. I would much prefer to have identical cloned toolbars (created automatically if option is enabled) docked to the top of each view in dual pane mode.

of all these, the most important is having each view in dual pane mode retain and independent path bar, independent commandline bar at bottom, and cloned toolbars for both views.

other stuff:
have an option for a close button on each tab (like FF3)/NP++ etc.

also the titlebar of the program is very cryptic...AppPath @ C:\[Control Panel]. Please make an option to just display the same thing as the path bar in the active view.

great software, but it has some way to go before i can use it to its full potential.

regards,
Leon
Last edited by Leeoniya on 2009 Jan 04, 04:22, edited 1 time in total.
narayan
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Post by narayan »

Hi Leon!

Welcome to the board!

Nikos is enjoying a week-long vacation, so his response would be coming later. Meanwhile, we can carry the ball forward...

Most of your suggestions are already considered. The themes behind x2 design are-

(a) Powerful usage of keyboard, so user do a lot with minimum effort
(b) to save screen space
(c) to avoid duplication.

Let us see your suggestions in that light:

@Address bar:
The address of each pane is already visible in pane headers (on the other hand, the addressbar can't have breadcrumbs. So we have an additional powerful mechanism for navigation.)

@DOS prompt:
How many times is that used in a day to deserve a separate screen presence? Besides, x2 provides a full-fledged console window, with more facilities than a regular cmd window.

@breadcrumbs:
Once you decide to go up, the peer folders come in picture. So retaining the older path does not make sense. Note that the path is supposed to reflect the current folder's address at all times. In your scheme, this will be totally confusing, depending on the past actions.

Note that we have a full-fledged history chain in x2 (which does not drop locations in case of Windows). Thus we can always use keyboard shortcuts to jump back to any folder from that chain. Also right-click on header to select ANY of the past folders.

@bookmarks:
Most users would not be able to remember a complete path to create ba bookmark. They will create a bookmark only after reaching the spot.

Separate toolbar is optional. You can always add them in the main toolbar.

I agree with you that the editing should be possible when you add a new bookmark. (It should not be separated in the Organize... menu option.)

@close button:
We do not enough space to begin with, thanks to dual pane design. So putting a button in each tab would eat up precious space.

HTH.
Leeoniya
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Post by Leeoniya »

you definitely make some valid points. turning off the address bar partially alleviates the need to scan across the entire screen to see the path for the opposite pane. but it also is impossible to retain this setting since needing to enter any dos command will bring it up permanently once again.

However, i think having identical bookmark toolbars aligned to each view is a must-have feature for effective dual pane operation. And lack of manual bookmark creation seems like an oversight. It's a pain in the butt to have to assemble the bookmark bar by hand, but thats not a show-stopper since it usually is done once.

While it's great that there's full keyboard support, i for example, have a need to make bookmarks to a multitude of locations where my keyboard shortcuts cannot remain uniform, eg ctrl+0-9. This makes it very difficult to access bookmarked locations quickly since i cannot remember the shortcut combo to each of 15-20 bookmarks.

there is actually plenty of screen space to clone a bookmark/custom bar to both views if a lot of never used buttons are eliminated such as Delete, Paste, Copy/Move.

i think without having fully independent panes in dual pane mode (address bar, commandline, separate/cloned toolbars), its not efficiently usable as a dual pane file manager. the whole advantage of having 2 panes if to allow specialization of each and for them to share only actions that relate to the interaction between the two. Beyond Compare as well as Winmerge get it right, granted you wont need synchronized traversal in the case of a regular file manager outside of compare functions.

here are a few other things i have stumbled upon after using x2 most of today:

- create a way (keyboard) to easily cycle through the View settings (thumbnail/detail) without needing to pull up the menu every time.
- include a "..Parent" link at the top of the file/folder view as ".." preceded by a folder icon, much more useful than a toolbar button or keyboard shortcut, since traversing is usually done by mouse anyhow.
- minimum button width - buttons can become very narrow and hard to click on currently if the text labels are short, or not displayed
- ability to place button text labels beside icons instead of below
- rightclick context menus and toolbar buttons should work on mousedown (not mouseup/click as currently), while menu items should work on mouseup (it should mimic the native Windows implementation)
- ability to display tabs when the breadcrumb bar is turned off
- auto-save folder settings if view or sorting is changed from default, revert to default on folder switching
- save folder view settings inside a program settings file or sqlite DB, not desktop.ini files in the filesystem itself
- search within results (local search) needs to filter out non-matched items (at the very least it needs to group them together) instead of just selecting them in a huge list which currently makes the feature quite impractical
- when traversing folders, going to parent reselects the last active item and scrolls to it which is good - however, scrolling to the item is not desirable if the folder is in detail view or any view that only has one column because everything above that item is scrolled out of view, placing that item at the top of the list - very annoying.

hope some of this helps,
Leon
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nikos
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Post by nikos »

for bookmarks checkout the miniscrap pane (view menu)
there are many demo videos on this page that demonstrate its use
www.zabkat.com/x2facts.htm
Mr.Pleasant
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Post by Mr.Pleasant »

- include a "..Parent" link at the top of the file/folder view as ".." preceded by a folder icon, much more useful than a toolbar button or keyboard shortcut, since traversing is usually done by mouse anyhow.
Much better is to doubleclick on an empty spot in the folder pane, or in the pane header. You should try this, I think you'll agree.
- search within results (local search) needs to filter out non-matched items (at the very least it needs to group them together) instead of just selecting them in a huge list which currently makes the feature quite impractical
If you want to filter search results, you can use the filter function (alt-G).
Double toolbars and address bars might save you an extra click to indicate which pane the action should go to, but it costs you a lot of screen estate. And a confusing amount of buttons, and short addressbars.
Leeoniya
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Post by Leeoniya »

very nice. yes, doubleclicking seems to work well for the most part. you have to doubleclick outside of the entire filelist though, otherwise it goes back and foth into and out of the selected item, even if the selection is not directly clicked.

for example if a file is selected doubeclicking in an empty area within the filelist will open the file, or if a folder is selected it will open the folder. only doubleclicking past the limits of the entire list works to go up a level, so continuously doubleclicking to cycle up several times cannot be done reliably since the limits of the file list can change from directory to directory.

i realize that this can also be an issue if you click repeatedly in a whitespace within the filelist since you may accidentally get a to a very tightly spaced filelist and click a file by accident, but it would still be much better than currently.

perhaps implementing rocker mouse gestures would be very beneficial in this case. call me Firefox spoiled.

Alt-G still only selects the needed files without grouping them close to each other, or bringing them all into view as needs to be done with a large result list, optimally filtering out of view all non-matching files would be implemented, currently, drilling down is impossible.

Leon
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Post by desslok »

Leeoniya wrote:for example if a file is selected doubeclicking in an empty area within the filelist will open the file, or if a folder is selected it will open the folder. only doubleclicking past the limits of the entire list works to go up a level
Are you talking about turning off full row selection?
Leeoniya
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Post by Leeoniya »

no. do this:

1. put view into list mode
2. select a folder
3. doubleclick any whitespace within the limits of the list as determined by the maximum extents of the longest filename and the vertical file list limit.

what happens is that the selected folder is entered, or the selected file is opened even though it was not directly doubleclicked.
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Post by profess »

Leeoniya,

maybe once you've used Alt+G you could send files to a scrap window. press Ctrl+S to add them (or check the Window Menu, make a scrap window and drag and drop them) to add files to a scrap window.

hope that helps,

Osei
Leeoniya
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Post by Leeoniya »

thanks,

it does work, but it is far from optimal since every step requires spawning a new scrap container and dragging the selection there which, again leaves many scrap containers open all over the screen and is very inefficient for continually refining large searches.

there needs to be a method to continuously search/filter within results inside the same window/scrap container. it would be best if the search function opened a new tab and did the entire drilldown in that tab rather than opening a million windows.
profess
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Post by profess »

once files are selected, there's a filter in the view menu i think.

it's called show selected files only. maybe that'd help.

using phone so cannot be more precise as not at pc.
Leeoniya
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Post by Leeoniya »

yes, this works well, still kinda annoying to use keyboard shortcut to continuously have to refilter selected files, but much smoother.

maybe make an option to do this automatically when doing local searches inside scrap containers.
profess wrote:using phone so cannot be more precise as not at pc.
lol
Leeoniya
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Post by Leeoniya »

i think i found a bug:

anything opened from the desktop by xplorer2 in a new window is always opened beneath other xplorer2 windows : (.
narayan
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Post by narayan »

Instead of DOUBLE-clicking, just use breadcrumbs. You can go ANY number of levels upward with a SINGLE click. Or press BKSP, which is even easier.
desslok
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Post by desslok »

Leeoniya wrote:1. put view into list mode
2. select a folder
3. doubleclick any whitespace within the limits of the list as determined by the maximum extents of the longest filename and the vertical file list limit.
Yeah, this shoud be fixed.
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