Messages

1

Support and Feedback / Re: Unwanted clutter in tree view

« on: September 05, 2015, 06:22:34 »

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

2

Support and Feedback / Re: Unwanted clutter in tree view

« on: September 04, 2015, 09:14:54 »

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.

3

Support and Feedback / Re: Where do you get the icon to place in front of the file name?

« on: September 03, 2015, 12:32:37 »

You can override icons in FileType Setup in config.

As you suggested, adding the mp3 extension to the icon section of that dialog indeed solved the problem I was having.

Thanks!

~Paul

4

Support and Feedback / Re: Unwanted clutter in tree view

« on: September 03, 2015, 12:24:32 »

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.

5

Support and Feedback / Unwanted clutter in tree view

« on: September 03, 2015, 08:28:12 »

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

6

Support and Feedback / Re: Where do you get the icon to place in front of the file name?

« on: September 03, 2015, 07:30:49 »

You can add a audio column that shows the bitrate.

I just tried that ... and it works, but for me not very useable. That's because I'm only looking at mp3 files perhaps 1% of the time, so the "kbps" column heading is usually just distracting clutter. Sigh ... the icon method is just so much better. Perhaps I'll just use explorer when I'm dealing with folders that contain primarily mp3 files.

MP3Ext is a Windows Explorer Extension.
MC is not built on top of Win Explorer so it have no effect in MC.

Ah ... ok, I didn't realize MP3Ext is an explorer extension. ... yet contrary to your claim, MP3Ext does have an effect in MC. (Just not the desired one).
Before enabling MP3Ext, MC displayed mp3 files using the icon of the application I use to open mp3 files (foobar2000). However after enabling this extension, MC displays mp3 files using the icon that you see in my earlier attachment (which looks somewhat like a blank white page). So I think my question about where MC gets its icons from is still a fair one. I tried changing the default program used to open mp3 files, but the icon used for mp3 files still did not change. Is there a way to change the icon used for mp3 files to match with my default audio application (or possibly with a user specified file?)
 

7

Support and Feedback / Where do you get the icon to place in front of the file name?

« on: September 02, 2015, 14:01:08 »

The first attachment shows one of my folders as displayed by the windows 10 file explorer.
In all cases, the icon that the file explorer puts in front of each file is the same as the icon that appears if I right click on the file and select "properties".
For example right clicking on the first file ("01 Turing.mp3") yields the properties window shown in the 2nd attachment.

The last attachment shows the same folder as displayed by MC. Note that the icons placed in front of each file is the same as what the file explorer uses for all files except the .mp3 files and the .ico file.

In the case of the ico file, MC is a bit smarter about the icon. File explorer merely shows the icon of the application associated with the ico extension whereas MC actually uses the contents of the file for the icon. Personally I wouldn't care that much about either choice, although MC's icon choice is probably better.

However in the case of the mp3 file, MC uses some other icon that does not seem appropriate at all. The icon that appears does not belong to the application that is associated with mp3 files (foobar2000) nor is it the icon that shows up in the property window. This is distressing, since I use mp3 files A LOT.

By the way, I used an application called "MP3ext" to modify the icons for mp3 files and perhaps that is related to the problem. Evidently it modifies the icons in a way that is acceptable to the property window as well as to the windows file explorer ... but it seems to throw MC for a loop. I probably could get rid of the inconsistency by removing MP3ext ... but on the other hand the icon themes used by MP3ext are really nice!

~Paul

8

Feature Requests and Suggestions / Re: It would be nice to be able to remove buttons from the File Commands toolbar

« on: August 26, 2015, 11:39:45 »

So no the toolbar is currently not customizable. It is on my list but require a lot of redesign and a total custom toolbar

Actually ... as the expression goes "When there is a will there is a way"

Attached is a screen capture showing my toolbars. Note that the icons on the file toolbar that I was not using have been blanked out.
For me, the reduction in visual clutter was worth the minor effort required to edit the icons file.
Also, for me the "C:/" on the clipboard icon was more confusing than helpful ... so I removed it.

The 5 black icons containing yellow text are my Quick Paths. Yes, I know I can get to them via the "star" icon, but I find I use these enough to justify having single click access. It's great that this toolbar is so customizable, since I like to use it for nearly everything. (I don't particularly care for the look of the button area at the bottom as well as the space it takes up, so I have disabled that.)

~Paul

9

Feature Requests and Suggestions / It would be nice to be able to remove buttons from the File Commands toolbar

« on: August 25, 2015, 09:17:13 »

Because the Command Line toolbar is so customizable I don't think it would add much to give the File Commands toolbar the same flexibility, but on the other hand it would be very nice to be able to at least remove buttons from the File Commands toolbar. (Forgive me if there is already a way to do this ... but I coudn't find it). In particular I would like to remove the last one ("Select File Coloring Profiles"). In fact it seems surprising to me that you even have that button there. It's in the menus and that would seem sufficient since one is unlikely to visit this menu after the initial setup is complete. So to me it just adds to the clutter. I feel the same about the button next to it (toggle visibility of system/hidden files). Personally I never want to hide any files. Doing that always ends up confusing me. There is also one other icon I would like to remove since I have replaced it with one of my own buttons on the command line toolbar.

If there is a way to replace the button icons, that would serve the same purpose. I could just replace the icon with a blank icon which would make the icon invisible, thus reducing the clutter factor.

~Paul

10

Support and Feedback / Re: Color of selected files in the inactive panel.

« on: August 24, 2015, 11:29:06 »

No that will not work. File Attributes and View state are totally different, A file can be shown in many view. And they can all have different view state.

I did realize that the view state is not really the same thing as the file attributes ... although I thought it still might work for them to be in the same place. By putting the view states first in the attributes rule list it would override the later file attributes settings. That could be all wrong of course. Clearly I haven't thought about the problem as much as you have

I been playing with the idea to create a step by step wizard.

That sounds like a lot of work. Also not everybody will appreciate the wizard. Wizards work fine when the user actually knows what they want, but for color schemes users rarely know what they want right away, and running the wizard over and over again probably would be too painful. I suspect you will be better off sticking with your current method and maybe making a few simplifications and clarifications in the organization. I think your time would be better spend adding a collection of example color schemes with directions for how to achieve that result. (Perhaps a config file next to a screen capture would be sufficient). Try to solicit these examples from your users many of which will have quite divergent ideas of what looks good. I would certainly be willing to contribute my color scheme, which I worked pretty hard on and am quite proud of how good it looks.

~Paul

11

Support and Feedback / Re: how do I run an external program on all selected files?

« on: August 24, 2015, 11:07:35 »

It might work if you in the option box check "Run separately for all provided files and folders"
and then use ${currentfilepath} instead. Then it should loop all selected files.
http://multicommander.com/docs/UDC_custom   (Scroll down to options)

Wow, this works.
It would have helped a whole lot if you had mentioned that I should use the MC.Run command.
I suspect this was so obvious to you that you didn't even think it deserved mention, but I saw many dozens of things that I thought might work but they didn't. Then finally I saw the Run command under the MC group and realized that this was the thing I needed. Anyway, the correct custom user command that I needed looks like this:

#options (RunSeparate)
MC.Run CMD="C:\util\binit.exe" ARG="${currentfilepath}"

I'm not sure why you were suspicious that this may not work ... but the button actually does exactly what I want!
Many thanks for your help.

~Paul

12

Support and Feedback / how do I run an external program on all selected files?

« on: August 22, 2015, 20:51:31 »

I usually delete without using the recycle bin, so I've told MC to default to not using the recycle bin. I usually use the delete button in the file commands toolbar and I'm happy with the way that works. However, I occasionally want to delete to the recycle bin and I decided to add a button to the command line bar for that purpose. Using a google search, I found an external program called "binit.exe" which will delete a file to the recycle bin (without a prompt which is what I consider appropriate for a delete which is easily reversed). So I added the user command C:\util\binit.exe "${sourcefocuspath}" and named it "Delete to recycle bin". Then I created a new button in the command line bar using this command and chose an appropriate looking icon. I'm pleased to say that when I select a file and click this new button it behaves exactly has I predicted and hoped!. Unfortunately if I select more than one file, when I click on the button, only the last selected file gets deleted. (I suspect this is no surprise to those of you who understand user commands which I obviously don't.) Anyway, can anyone give me a suggestion for how to modify the button so that it deletes all the selected files?

Thanks.
~Paul

13

Support and Feedback / Re: Color of selected files in the inactive panel.

« on: August 22, 2015, 19:11:59 »

I will see if I can add an option for disabling the fade thing.
I try not too add more setting around the color since there are already to many, and also because there are so many there so there is a risk that when adding something, something else will break. Specially here where a lot of settings are connected. But I think that an option for disabling fade should, possible, maybe, be safe to add.

That will be nice ... although looking at the enhancements section of the forum I suspect there are some higher priority items

If you decide to tackle this one however, I think I have a suggestion for you that will have almost no impact on the user interface. In the File Coloring Rules Editor you have an "Attributes" field with 17 possible values ranging from archive to placeholder field. Simply add three more:
1.) focus
2.) selected
3.) active panel

I believe that will also allow you to remove the eight "File and Folder state colors" in the explorer panel settings, thus simplifying and unifying the overall color selection interface.

One other minor idea for the explorer panel settings color page is to group the Active panel alternating background color and the inactive panel alternating background color selections underneath the checkbox "Alternating Background color". My reasoning is that with the current ordering it is not obvious that the two Background color selections apply when the alternating background color box is not checked. This had me confused for some time. Also it is not clear to me that you really need the first checkbox (Highlight the background on panel in focus). If you decided you didn't want such highlighting, couldn't you just set the background color of the inactive panel to be the same as the background color of the active panel? Yes, one more color selection you have to make (if you don't want highlighting) but still you benifit from a simpler easier to understand interface. If you decide to keep this checkbox, shouldn't it say "active panel" instead of "panel in focus". (You usually use the word "focus" for files not panels.)

The reason I'm offering all these suggestions is that I suspect there is a significant fraction of your users that have looked at the color selection interface and have given up trying to understand it, thus marginalizing a large fraction of your wonderful effort.

~Paul

14

Support and Feedback / Re: Color of selected files in the inactive panel.

« on: August 21, 2015, 09:27:42 »

Normally the Background is getting lighter and text darker. But with your configuration that is not happening since you disabled items specific background so the background for the item is not changing. Making the fade effect bad..

Early on I disabled items specific backgrounds because that made the already complex color settings even harder to wrap my brain around, but now I see that this is actually needed to get an acceptable windows mode color scheme. So thanks for that suggestion. After a little experimentation with it I converged onto a pleasing color scheme. I still have no control over the way the selected files look in inactive mode, however the default (despite having a somewhat unexpected look that I wouldn't have chosen) was never-the-less quite readable. So I'm now happy with the color scheme and believe it was worth the work to understand the MC coloer settings.

Thanks again for your patience.

~Paul

15

Support and Feedback / Re: Color of selected files in the inactive panel.

« on: August 20, 2015, 02:38:52 »

Hmm Are you sure. the background will change since you have different color for background of active/inactive.. Colors can look difference if the background are change.  The Text Color should not change depending on active/inactive.

The attached picture shows the appearance change between the active and inactive states.
Perhaps you call the color of the selected file the same in both panels, but to my 61 year old eyes the letters in the inactive panel are so faded out that I can barely even tell what the characters are not to mention tell what color they are. I'm surprised you chose such a strong "faded" factor for the inactive color. Then again your eyes may have many fewer years on them than mine

Only time colors are changed is by Color Rules or to emulate Explorer if Explorer Mode is active..(But that will only affect selected items, they get "faded" when panel is not in focus.. .)

I guess you are suggesting that I can disable the problematic fading out of the characters by switching from explorer mode to commander mode. But is there any other way to solve the problem? I have been using the windows style right click, F5 for refresh, ... etc. for decades and I may be too set in my ways to reprogram myself to use the commander styles which I have never been exposed to.

~Paul

16

Support and Feedback / Color of selected files in the inactive panel.

« on: August 18, 2015, 13:28:02 »

The color setup for MC is about as complicated as any application I have used, but since I am picky about the colors for the applications I use most I appreciate the flexibility to control the colors so precisely. After much fiddling, I've gotten the colors to look exactly like I wanted, except for one small problem. I've chosen purple as the color of the files that have been selected. When the panel containing the selected files becomes inactive the color changes from purple to some other color. That behavior seems entirely appropriate, but the problem is: "how is that color chosen?". Right now the color chosen for that is so faint that I can hardly even read it. I would like to change it to a subtle color to make it obvious that it no longer is active - but not so subtle that I can't even read it (as in the current situation).

Since the color selections are so varied, I have attached a screen capture showing the color setting dialogs. I have marked this up to show the colors that I have entered for the respective choices. And BTW I used the alternating background colors selections because I liked how obvious it made it to tell at a glance which panel was the active one and which one was inactive.

And finally one other related question. Although the purple color is bright enough to make the selected files stand out, I was thinking of ways to make them even more obvious. One way I thought to try was to use a bold face font for the selected files. I noticed that I could select bold face for just about every file type, but the selected files themselves couldn't be set to bold. That seems strange to me, since of all the file names on the panel, the selected files are the ones where bold face would seem the most appropriate, yet these are the only files that may not be set to bold. Am I missing something there?

Thanks
~Paul

17

Support and Feedback / Question on Quick Launch Customization

« on: August 18, 2015, 13:06:13 »

I added a quick launch button for my program editor by entering "D:\EditPlus\editplus.exe" in the Program path field of the quick launch customization panel. Then I found I could drag and drop files onto the button and the editor would open as expected with the dropped file. But I wanted to tell it to open the currently selected file when I clicked on the quick launch button. First I tried putting the string "%1" in the parameter field. Although I don't quite know why, this has worked when I needed to call an external program from dozens of different applications, but it didn't work this time. I also tried putting the string "${sourcefocuspath}" in there, but that didn't work either. The "<" button next to the parameter field seemed to suggest I might need quotation marks around the field, but that didn't help. I suppose I'm doing something pretty obviously wrong, but I can't seem to figure out what.
Thanks
~Paul

18

Support and Feedback / Re: Hiding removeable drives with no media

« on: August 15, 2015, 22:28:21 »

> 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

19

Support and Feedback / Hiding removeable drives with no media

« on: August 14, 2015, 20:43:32 »

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

20

Support and Feedback / Re: display extension right after file name

« on: August 14, 2015, 17:59:57 »

Ah ... so there it is. I guess I didn't go slowly enough when I crawled thru all the configuration settings. Sorry about that.

Thanks.
~Paul

21

Feature Requests and Suggestions / Disable FTP file log

« on: August 14, 2015, 12:26:45 »

The few ftp sites I use are so reliable that the ftp log that pops up when I open an ftp site is both uninteresting and annoying. It takes up a lot of space that could be used in the file listing. I usually end up closing the log window to reclaim this space right after opening the ftp site. It gets tiresome to have to do this every time. Perhaps an option to disable this window could be justified.

~Paul

22

Support and Feedback / display extension right after file name

« on: August 14, 2015, 12:07:32 »

I saw in a screenshot posted to the forum the extensions where displayed with the file name (i.e. file123.txt). However I am not able to figure out how this was done. The only way I have been able to see the extension is to have it appear in its own column. Can anyone explain to me how the person who posted that screen shot managed to do this?

Thanks
~Paul

23

Support and Feedback / Re: How do I enable Rules Based coloring?

« on: August 11, 2015, 18:51:27 »

Ah ... I did finally find the explorer panel nestled in amoung the menu menus. Thanks.
~Paul

24

Support and Feedback / How do I enable Rules Based coloring?

« on: August 11, 2015, 15:08:16 »

When I select the File Coloring Rules Editor, it won't let me use it.
At the bottom of this editor I see the message:
"Your color setting in Explorer panel does not allow for Rules based coloring.
To see this color rules in use you must enable that option."

Ok, so I would like to enable this option. But what option? And I can't find a panel called the Explorer Panel.

Thanks in advance for your help.
~Paul