Official announcement: http://www.ghisler.ch/board/viewtopic.php?t=21820
The newest version brings out almost 600 fixes (mostly related to new functionality) and many new features. In this mini-review I will try to focus on the biggest changes only because I want to avoid copy&paste of help file. I recommend to take a look on Help or HISTORY.TXT files (some additions will be listed at the end of my post though).
I also encourage anyone to write full review about how do you use the newest TC or what do you expect from it
What is worth to mention is that 7.5pb1 is free for any registered user. Simply run downloaded file and improved installer will update your installation without any data loss.
Even having above in mind I recommend anyone to make backup of your TC (&data but it's obvious) before using it. This is first public beta and new bugs will be found. If you find any, please, report them on TC's forum board.
1. Unicode support
The most awaited feature was to have this application Unicode aware. TC previously had been warning users about improper characters in directories names but it changed. All internal tools support Unicode now. Also plugins API has been updated for that reason. I hope its authors will update their files soon to use it to the fullest.
Internal "Compare by content" window gained few benefits and allows to compare any combination of ANSI, UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-16 little endian (Mac).
2. Files handling
64bit systems users will be satisfied now because context menu problems should be gone. TC handles them properly and even allows to define which shell extensions should be shown for them.
Also all time-related functions now use the NTFS time instead of the old FAT file system time (dates before 1980 supported). There are no problems with paths containing names longer than 259 characters too.
Copy dialog gained Pause/Start buttons also in foreground transfers. Copying to multiple targets (folders or LNK files) is supported by selecting them before copy.
3. FTP
All connections are now stored with within tree and can be grouped in folders for easier usage. Because of many complaints about passwords storage security, TC offers master password (AES) for better protection of your data.
Obviously, all encoding related features has been also added like:
- detecting code page reported by some servers,
- encoding support in Shift+F5 (server to server copying),
- allowing the user to choose the encoding of file names.
4. Breadcrumbs
There were few requests on public board about this functionality and one of them growth large enough to gain author's agreement for implementation. So similar to other file managers (i.e. DirectoryOpus, Vista's Explorer) TC has breadcrumb navigation panel now. The biggest difference from other software is that even if breadcrumbs are mainly mouse oriented, Total offers keyboard shortcuts (Alt+F11, Alt+F12) for them what extends it's usability for each keyboard lover.
By default breadcrumbs seem to be harder to handle because of no automatic menu pop-up but after a little bit of playing with wincmd.ini file, they are lot easier to use.
Drag'n'drop is fully supported not only for local drives but also for FTP and filesystem (WFX) plugins.
5. Internal associations system
One of the best features (IMHO better than Unicode) delivered within newest TC is portable files associations system which allow to skip Windows registry hell while dealing with various files. Thanks to that you can assign any application to any kind of file by your own and be sure that your setting will follow you with your pendrive together with favourite applications. All changes made are not messing with operating system and are valid in TC only. By default each assigned program is called by Enter or double click but there is nothing against having more than one application: they will be visible in RMB menu or in separate one (called with cm_ContextMenuInternal command).
Sounds simple and not revealing my excitement yet? Well...
The power of this feature is using similar approach as for files names colouring which are filters based on "Find files" dialog. It is now possible to have rules defined according to various files attributes like date, size, hidden / system /etc. or data provided by content (WDX) plugins. So (i.e.) you can have AIMP opened for John Lennon's songs and Foobar for Paul McCartney ones (to keep 'em separated
Of course, if there are no internal associations, Windows ones will be used instead.6. Lister
Due to Unicode support it would be inexcusable if there is no support for different characters encoding. Since this version Lister will not only allow you to change displayed text's characters set but will also offer full RTL handling, with easy language direction switch between LTR and RTL (hold Ctrl and press either left or right Shift key).
7. Quick filter
Quick filter (Ctrl+S, Ctrl+Shift+S), as the name reveals, give the possibility to filter files list according to typed phrase. QF, custom views and file types filter (menu Show -> Custom) - these features altogether make files operations much easier than any other known (at least to me) file manager.
8. Button bar
Over the years buttons bar seemed to be ignored and few changes made to it, so Christian Ghisler took his time (and users ideas) and extended its functionality. Maximum number of available buttons has been incerased to 500 and they can be placed in multiple rows. No more gymnastics with empty buttons
For such purpose button bar edit dialog has been redesigned a little bit:
As you can see on the picture above, you can add a "link" to other button bar. You can even treat it as pop-up menu:
9. More, and more, and more…
All previous paragraphs are only a brief description of new features. Lots of things have been improved (i.e. synchronize tool or new command line parameters) and it's impossible to write them all and keep myself away from overwriting. I recommend (once again) to take a look on history file to get whole fixes / addins coverage.. For simple list of some addins, for which I got bored too soon to make it complete... simply click on button below.
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