Hiding removeable drives with no media

[pmennen]

My computer evidently can have up to six removable usb disks and they all show up with drive letters in MultiCommander.
This is slightly distracting when I'm displaying the root level directory since the list of drives is longer than necessary.
Worse however is the drive button bar which I find quite useful. However there are so many drives, that the last couple of network drives do not appear because there is not enough room on the button bar.

Is there a way to display only drives that actually have files on them?

I tried adding these keys to the registry, but it didn't seem to change MultiCommander's behaviour.

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced]
"HideDrivesWithNoMedia"=dword:00000001
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced]
"HideDrivesWithNoMedia"=-

Thanks
~Paul

[Mathias (Author)]

That hack is for Windows Explorer.. and MC is not built on top of explorer as many other FM are.

In Explorer Panel settings you can disable some groups of devices (Could, Special Folders, Virtual) but not individual devices.
The FolderTree can filter devices to show.

[pmennen]

> The FolderTree can filter devices to show.

I tried that to filter out the six drives that show up as "USB removable". That does unclutter the tree view, but at a large cost. It means when I do plug in a USB stick I can't see it's contents in MC. Also this step does not remove the unneeded drive buttons which was my main objective.

Actually I did find a way to make a USB removable drive button disappear. All I have to do is plug a USB stick into its associated USB port. Once the drive is recognized, the drive button works as expected. Then when I remove the USB stick, the drive button disappears from the drive bar. The drive letter also disappears from the tree view. Both behaviours are expected and desired. Then the drive button and tree drive letter will reappear when the USB stick is reinserted. (Although a refresh seems to be needed). So the only problem is really at program startup, when all the removable drive letters are enabled whereas it seems like they all should be disabled.

I found one other workaround to the problem. I noticed that one can enable an option to place the drive letters below the buttons. This saves a lot of horizontal space and allows all the drives to fit into the space available for the drive bar. This takes up more vertical space which is also at a premium, but it least I can use all the drive buttons (which I find quite handy). It would seem better to put the drive letters inside the buttons. Perhaps I can do this? Is there a way to customize the button bitmaps?

Lest I sound like a complainer, I would like to point out that although your handling of removable devices is perhaps less than perfect, in nearly every other aspect I find your MC absolutely amazing. I have tried out many file explorer alternatives and at one point I have even purchased Directory Opus, one of the best, and absolutely the most expensive solution. Yet in most respects I find MC even better! I'm sure you could charge for it if you wanted to. The only drawbacks are that you would waste some time managing the selling aspects, and also your audience would probably be a lot smaller.

~Paul