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Unwanted clutter in tree view

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Mathias (Author):

--- Quote from: pmennen on September 04, 2015, 09:14:54 ---
--- Quote from: Mathias (Author) on September 03, 2015, 22:21:50 ---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.

--- End quote ---

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).

--- End quote ---
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.


--- Quote from: pmennen on September 04, 2015, 09:14:54 ---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.

--- End quote ---

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:

--- Quote from: Mathias (Author) on September 04, 2015, 09:45:28 ---Most uses do not have lots of unused devices with no media in them, This is a very rare situation.

--- End quote ---

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

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