blog: browse 7Z/RAR/ISO in xplorer2 and other file managers

[wasker]

Speaking of which: that'd be nice to see 7zf to show as "7-zip folder", not "ExplorerFrame".

Another problem cropped up with this release:


Basically, the extension holds my file hostage.

[nikos]

i am aware of this, not sure why it happens. The workaround for the moment is to open ANOTHER archive then the one you want to delete gets unlocked. It is not xplorer2 that locks it but explorer (!)

[Thracx]

...

Just wanted to say thanks to nikos for taking the time to work on this extension. Too many good ideas die slowly because they don't get enough man hours to become useful - glad to see 1 of them stay alive and become productive!

[Kilmatead]

Starting in Windows 10 Insider Preview, this does not launch the association dialog box. It displays a dialog to the user informing them that they can change the default programs used to open file extensions in their Settings

Regrettably, the most recent build (10122) of Win10 has finally begun enforcing this (as noted here) and a quick VM of 10122 verifies this. Very annoying.

...neither desktop nor Universal (UAP) apps will be able to show a dialog prompting the user

What makes it doubly annoying is that the message one does get is rather vague as it only says "go to Settings -> System -> Default Apps". It neglects to mention the extra steps necessary (to get to the "old" dialog), of then selecting "Set defaults by app", finding "SevenZipFolder" in the list and clicking it, and finally selecting "Choose defaults for this program". Any deviation from that can result in a lot of confusion for the unwary user.

In other words, it now takes 6 mouse-clicks (plus some scrolling on certain pages) to get the right menu (not including the clicks necessary to select filetypes themselves), which we used to be able to invoke automatically. And that's 6 mouse-clicks which assume the user actually knows what he's looking for and where he's going - for most people navigating Windows settings-menus is guesswork and mistakes.

The "old standby" of shell:::{17cd9488-1228-4b2f-88ce-4298e93e0966} as default-programmes still exists and gets us halfway there, but it's manual-only after that.

I'm still searching for a means of providing a more salutary shortcut, but as LaunchAdvancedAssociationUI itself was the de-facto shortcut for "named applications", and they intentionally sabotaged that (in turn) after intentionally sabotaging the perfectly functional registry Classes method which worked for the better part of 20 years... I'm not going to hold my breath.

As all the online documentation is still geared towards ApplicationAssociationRegistrationUI behaviour under Win8, nothing is current, and judging from their intent, unlikely to be.

On the plus-side, instead of referring to the more technical "explorerframe" when manually setting default association properties, it uses the friendlier "File Explorer" label instead. Whoopee.

[nikos]

a small update to version 1.1, adding support for password protected archives. You can get it here
http://zabkat.com/blog/compressed-folde ... ension.htm

[Kilmatead]

And if someone had heeded my advice and updated the 7z.DLL to the latest release version (it is not in beta), we could also have RAR5 support out of the box. But oh no, we get the year-old DLL which is useless. When I was a kid, we had to look both ways before we let loose our model aeroplanes into oncoming traffic!

[dmattote]

And it still is not available for Win XP...

[wingood]

can these archive-viewing addons help us include the contents of archive when scanning for duplicates?

[nikos]

yes you can discover duplicates inside archives, but at present you cannot delete within archives (readonly)

[raeesbhatti]

Hello there, this is an excellent piece of software. I was actually going to create one based on exactly the same idea because I had been wanting/looking for it for a long time. So, thank you for making it. I have only this question: Is this open-source? And if it is where can I find the source code?
I wanted to tinker it a bit.

[profess]

There is another project at http://www.tc4shell.com that does the same thing as Niko's tool. Maybe you can ask there too.

[nikos]

the "other" project looks more advanced but doesn't work properly with xplorer2
as for my own, it isn't open source but if you read the blog article it has information about the source code where I started off

[FrizzleFry]

I got tc4shell to work with x2 by right clicking archives and open with Windows Explorer (click choose another app to "always" use WE).

tc4shell can handle multi-part rars and it can keep a list of passwords for encrypted archives.

[nikos]

did he fix the problem of auto-refresh when adding items in e.g. a 7zip archive?