Develop all nodes

[Pierre83]

Hello. I just discovered this great soft and am trying to use it.
1 feature I was unable to found is the one provided by the * key in Windows Explorer = developping all nodes of a folder in the folder panel, allowing to display all the sub-folders without having to click on each "+".
Am I wrong or this feature is not part of MC?
Thanks.

[Mathias (Author)]

So if you stand in C:\ in the FolderTree view it should expand the entire drive ?

That feature was left out on purpose, because it can have some really strange effect on the program with lockup and other stuff. in situation where you got lot of files and subfolders.

[Pierre83]

Indeed, it can be dangerous used at the root of a disk (like it is currently in Windows).

But it is very useful when you have a lot of files to assign to several subfolders.
For example, consider you have 10 year foldders, each one with 12 month subfolders, each month including a "me" and "others" subfolders. (And on the right panel, xxx pictures to dispatch). Without *, you need to click 130 times on all the +  to have all the folders displaying on the left panel.

I don't know if it could interest other people.
On my side, this is the only missing feature preventing me to become a MC user.
Thanks.

[Jungle]

I haven't yet tried built-in scripting, but what if make it possible to do expanding via scripts?

P.S. Some nodes in folder tree have "+" square although they haven't subfolders. So when you try expand such nodes, "+" just disappears

[Pierre83]

Being able to expand all the nodes of the subfolders and subsubfolders from one folders with scripting could be great. I must say I'm not a programmer.
Using this feature, the + for the folders without any subfolder should disappear too then.
Thanks.

[sheffieldma]

I have a related request. Currently, the nodes in the folder tree are shown with "+" or "-" symbols, which can be clicked on to expand or collapse the subtree. As previous comments pointed out, even folders without subfolders have the +. The only way to see if a folder has subfolders is to click on the + (or click on the folder name). It would be helpful if the + was only shown for the folders that had subfolders. This is the way that Windows Explorer works (my system is Win XP).

[Mathias (Author)]

It work like that because of performance reason. Else it would have to look in all subfolder and check if they really are empty or not, and that would hurt performance a bit.
I do not think I will change that behavior.

[sheffieldma]

It would be helpful if the + was only shown for the folders that had subfolders.

I suspect the performance would be good for most users who have only local, and not network disks. Perhaps it could be made an option in the Tweaking category?

Another possibility would be to make it a command, similar to Refresh. The scanning could be limited to a selected folder (and its subfolders).