Unwanted clutter in tree view

[pmennen]

Attached is one of my tree views. When I insert a USB stick I usually use the tree view to determine its drive letter and to view its content. However the tree view is so cluttered I sometimes find myself going back to explorer just so I can find the new drive letter. All the items it the MC tree view are legitimate drives or devices masquerading as drives except for "Favorites" and "Windows Registry". I really wonder why these items are in the tree view. (Obviously I would prefer not). Even more problematic are the H,I,J,L,M drives. These drives are not really there (and do not appear in the file explorer). I mentioned these before, thinking this was just a choice you made in MC to display potential drives, but since I don't see other users complaining of this I'm wondering if this is just a setup problem on my windows 10 system. Is there a way to delete these drives from my system entirely? I realize that this means I would never be able to use these drive letters - which is a problem, but it would not be as bad as coping with all this clutter in the tree view (as well as the 5 extra drive buttons that shouldn't be there). The optical drive (R) is also problematic. As in this screen capture, it is often shown both in the alphabetical listing and again in the later section. In this example it is even shown twice in the lower list and in fact I've occasionally seen the R drive listed as many as a dozen times! All the while, file explorer doesn't even show the R drive once (as it shouldn't since there is no disk inserted into the optical drive). The K drive is a flash drive that actually is inserted into the computer, but sometimes it appears in the alphabetical listing and sometimes (as in this capture) appears below, and sometimes it even in both places. Also adding to the confusion the K or N drives may appear  in the upper (alphabetical) section in the left pane tree but in the lower spot in the right pane tree.

Sorry if I sound overly critical ... I realize you can't make choices that appeal to all users. But just the same I thought you might want to know about the problems I have run into.
~Paul

[Mathias (Author)]

If you have a drive letter you have a device there.  It might be a device with removable media like sdcard/dvd or similar. But it is a device that windows assigned a letter to. else something is really weird with your system if you got ghost devices.

In Explorer panel under the Folder Tree section you have a "Device filter" field where you can enter a comma separated list with what items to show.

[pmennen]

If you have a drive letter you have a device there.

I don't think that is true. But yes, there could be something weird with my system, although I have worked on a lot of systems and I don't see what is weird. Attached is a picture of what my disks look like according to the Device Management app.
Notice that only the 5 letters C-G have actually drives listed. Yes, H,I,J,L,M,R have drive letters shown but under all of those letters it says "No Media". The windows file explorer and the other explorer replacements I have used choose not to display the "No Media" drives where as MC chooses to display them. I'm sure you have your reasons for going against tradition there, but it is hard to see what it is.

In Explorer panel under the Folder Tree section you have a "Device filter" field where you can enter a comma separated list with what items to show.

Thanks for letting me know about the device filter. I used that to remove the Favorites and Registry items in the tree which I wouldn't have known how to do otherwise. I also found that I can use it to remove the unwanted (No Media) drive letters from the tree, although unfortunately it doesn't also remove the unwanted drive buttons. This does make the file tree more useable ... but at a pretty stiff price. If I plug a flash drive in and windows assigns one of the drive letters that I have excluded from the Device filter to the flash drive, then I can't see it in MC. I would have to open it with the file explorer or some other alternative.

[Mathias (Author)]

If you have a drive letter you have a device there.

I don't think that is true. But yes, there could be something weird with my system, although I have worked on a lot of systems and I don't see what is weird. Attached is a picture of what my disks look like according to the Device Management app.
Notice that only the 5 letters C-G have actually drives listed. Yes, H,I,J,L,M,R have drive letters shown but under all of those letters it says "No Media". The windows file explorer and the other explorer replacements I have used choose not to display the "No Media" drives where as MC chooses to display them. I'm sure you have your reasons for going against tradition there, but it is hard to see what it is.

As the screen shot shows  you have devices H,I,j and so on, They are valid devices. BUT there is no media in the device, But it is still a connected device.
Since MC is not built in top of Win Explorer (As many other FM are)  MC can not relay on explorer to tell MC the state.

In Explorer panel under the Folder Tree section you have a "Device filter" field where you can enter a comma separated list with what items to show.

Thanks for letting me know about the device filter. I used that to remove the Favorites and Registry items in the tree which I wouldn't have known how to do otherwise. I also found that I can use it to remove the unwanted (No Media) drive letters from the tree, although unfortunately it doesn't also remove the unwanted drive buttons. This does make the file tree more useable ... but at a pretty stiff price. If I plug a flash drive in and windows assigns one of the drive letters that I have excluded from the Device filter to the flash drive, then I can't see it in MC. I would have to open it with the file explorer or some other alternative.

The settings are for the FolderTree, So it would be weird if it also change the toolbar and such.
You can disable "groups" in the toolbar. like remove Special, Virtual, Could.
You do not need to exclude USB Flash drives. When the flash drive is not there, there is not a device there.
Only devices that have removable media are always there like dvd,cd,card reader
And even if a device is not shown in the folder tree you can still access it from the dropdown or by path

[pmennen]

As the screen shot shows  you have devices H,I,j and so on, They are valid devices. BUT there is no media in the device, But it is still a connected device.
Since MC is not built in top of Win Explorer (As many other FM are)  MC can not relay on explorer to tell MC the state.

You don't need to rely on explorer to tell you which drives to display. In fact I can see that you already know which drives are worth selecting. For example if I use the popup menu to select one of the devices that have no media, MC simply ignores the selection. (The popup remains at the old setting). So yes, these are valid devices, but MC is a file manager not a device manager. (We already have a perfectly good device manager for the rare occasions we need it).

My only confusion is why your other users have not complained about this. Perhaps they feel uneasy making complaints about a program offered to them for free. I share this unease, but still, I have a tendency to speak my mind. There is a reason other file managers hide these devices. All the buttons in the drive bar, all the entries in the popup menu, and all the entries in the tree view that correspond to devices containing no media are worse than useless. They are clumbsy and counter-productive since they obscure the devices that we are using to manage our files. It also makes it much more difficult to tell when the computer has recognized that some media was inserted into one of the devices.

[Mathias (Author)]

As the screen shot shows  you have devices H,I,j and so on, They are valid devices. BUT there is no media in the device, But it is still a connected device.
Since MC is not built in top of Win Explorer (As many other FM are)  MC can not relay on explorer to tell MC the state.

You don't need to rely on explorer to tell you which drives to display. In fact I can see that you already know which drives are worth selecting. For example if I use the popup menu to select one of the devices that have no media, MC simply ignores the selection. (The popup remains at the old setting). So yes, these are valid devices, but MC is a file manager not a device manager. (We already have a perfectly good device manager for the rare occasions we need it).

That is happen after it tries to access the device. That is totally different. You do not want to do that when the list is created, it would be slow.

My only confusion is why your other users have not complained about this. Perhaps they feel uneasy making complaints about a program offered to them for free. I share this unease, but still, I have a tendency to speak my mind. There is a reason other file managers hide these devices. All the buttons in the drive bar, all the entries in the popup menu, and all the entries in the tree view that correspond to devices containing no media are worse than useless. They are clumbsy and counter-productive since they obscure the devices that we are using to manage our files. It also makes it much more difficult to tell when the computer has recognized that some media was inserted into one of the devices.

Most uses do not have lots of unused devices with no media in them, This is a very rare situation.
And the Folder Tree is a bad concept and should not have been added at all, It only works well with mouse.
It is good enough for 99%, Yes it could be better, But I don't like to add thing to the device handling because it is already so complex and there is a high risk of something else breaking causing it to take a lot more time to fix. I have limited time to spent on developing so I have to choose what I want to spend it on.

[pmennen]

Most uses do not have lots of unused devices with no media in them, This is a very rare situation.

I can understand why you don't want to spend time on this issue, although I don't think it is as rare as you think.
Desktop machines with internal flashcard readers are generally installed this way. When the driver is installed for the first time, a different drive letter is assigned to each slot of the flashcard reader. (5 drives in my case).

That said - I'm no longer concerned about the issue because I have discovered a work-around. I'm letting you know in case you receive a similar complaint in the future.

It is well known that you can use the disk manager to reassign drive letters. What seems less well known is that you can assign a device to an empty folder on another disk.

You first have to create the empty folders manually using your file manager.
I used folder names such as "FlashSDmicro" and "FlashSDfull" and "FlashCompact" on my G drive (which I use mostly for backups)

Then you right click on the disk (in disk management) and select the "Change drive letter and paths" option. Then remove the drive letter that is currently assigned. Then click the radio button that allows you to enter a folder name and browse to the empty folder previously created.

It's as simple as that. I don't use flash cards so often that it is worth it to have a drive letter assigned to it anyway. In fact this is somewhat easier since unlike the drive letter, the folder name tells you which slot you are using.

Now I can go back to my preferred side by side panel arrangement which I had abandoned because there were too many drive buttons. And the clutter in the tree view is dramatically reduced. I'm surprised it took me so long to find this solution but it works great!

~Paul