zabkat support forum

Pardon the stupid questions, but....Does any of you guys
(Edit: By "You guys", I mean the developer(s)/QA(s)/Support of the software)
actually run xplorer2 in a real corp environment ? Because the following scenario is the very first annoyance I encounter very early on with xplorer2.

Say, I open this remote folder in Right-Pane: \\somefileserver\filedump
It has A WHOLE LOT of files, so certainly it will take time to list them. OK, fine.  I wait.

Now if I add a new tab to Right-Pane, so that I can display another folder....
it will AGAIN read and display \\somefileserver\filedump.
So I wait again.

Is there anyway to get around this annoyance ?

thanks

I have in the past.  And that was an issue then.

But I am retired for a couple of years now, and have no insight into the responsiveness of recent version(s).

I also do on a daily basis.
No problems, when I am in house, as LAN and file servers are fast.
But it is a true annoyance to work over a 'thin' line (6 Mbit DSL) from home via VPN. It is a must to hide the tree and file/folder info - popups and one has - just as you describe - to wait until folders with a lot of items have loaded to continue work.
Even Explorer feels much better in this use case.

Asynchronous loading of directories and a tree behavior like Explorer has (do not automatically and synchronously load all subfolders of the opened folder on a network share) would be highly appreciated.

fgagnon wrote:I have in the past.  And that was an issue then.

But I am retired for a couple of years now, and have no insight into the responsiveness of recent version(s).

hi from your response, I'm guessing you're not with xplorer2 support ?

My question is toward Support which I thought answer this sub-forum.

dang...who the heck moved this thread ?  :x

matelot,

I think you are imagining a large (or at least a formal) organization.
zabkat is a one-man show; and that man is nikos.
"Support" consists of nikos plus knowledgeable users who are willing to help.

I moved the thread from the old 2xExplorer forum.  
(2xExplorer was the precursor to xplorer2, and was "officially pronounced dead" by nikos five years ago.  ref: http://netez.com/2xExplorer/ )

fgagnon, ok, thanks for the move.

Nikos, pleeeaaase fix this -
what I was trying to imply in my original post was that this is such an obvious "defect"  (imagine FireFox/IE loading the same site when you add a new tab....)

thanks

new tabs work like that and most of the time it is a matter of convenience opening the new tab on the selected folder item (ie you get a subfolder of what you were browsing). So before you hit <ctrl+ins> point to a folder item that isn't huge. Alternatively, go to your tree or the miniscrap, select the folder you want and hit <ctrl+ins> on that

Matelot,
I do work a lot within those "real corp environments", and I noticed that at least with some file servers there is a considerable delay in displaying folders when you have color coding (Customize - Color coding...) activated. When I'm having this, I deactivate color coding for one pane, which pane I then reserve for browsing the file server. The other pane, focussed on the local drive has color coding activated (up to you of course!).
Besides this, there are some other factors which may slow down the display, like for instance if you use 'slow' columns in the detailed view (the ones without the '[s]' in the column customization), but I never noticed that this has special impact on file servers.

Maybe this helps!

fuxs wrote:Asynchronous loading of directories...

Yes please...  I've been quite the fanatic of X² for many years now, and my only major complaint is it's serious lack of multi-threading.  I don't knock nikos for it, since he'll probably have to re-engineer half his code to get X² to be truly threaded.  I code with threads daily and I still don't proclaim it to be easy by any means.

But there are some specific places where isolated threading could be very useful and this is one - folder content loading.  Have a ThreadPool sitting around and offload file loading tasks to it - perhaps it would make loading small folders slightly slower but it would be so much more appreciated for these slowly loading ones.  I have no problem waiting for the contents to load but making the rest of X² non-responsive is evil .

my only excuse for threading, actually 2 of them, are:
1. slow reads are interruptible, press ESC to abort (the status bar says when this is possible)
2. if you know there's a slow folder coming up, instead of pressing <enter> to browse it press <ctrl+enter> on it instead to open it in a new window (thread)

Thanks for the quick response nikos!

nikos wrote:1. slow reads are interruptible, press ESC to abort (the status bar says when this is possible)

True™, but that normally does not work for me.  Not sure why it doesn't work - I don't recall others complaining about that - but I haven't bothered to post about it because I don't do accidental large searches very often... Best to pick and choose your battles  ;-)

For searches which are not accidental..well, I want them to finish, so canceling is not an option but results in a non-responsive application (sometimes ).  So we must wait for the search to finish before resuming another file operation.  Quite annoying - in the least, each Tab/Scrap should have it's own thread.

It doesn't happen at home very often because I don't search often, but at work I often search my office's network shares... which I now simply accept as a good time to to use the restroom since I often can't work in any of my other X² tabs  :lol:

nikos wrote:2. if you know there's a slow folder coming up, instead of pressing <enter> to browse it press <ctrl+enter> on it instead to open it in a new window (thread)

This case doesn't happen to me often.  %SystemRoot%\System32 is usually my biggest threat and it's not horrible.  And I like X² mainly because I like dual-panes and tabs... not because I like multiple windows  8)