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Poll

Which File Manager do you rely on in Windows?

Windows Explorer
Directory Opus
Total Commander
XYPlorer
xplorer2
Altap/Servant Salamander
Frigate
Speed Commander
AB Commander
Haven't decided yet.
Other
Variety is the spice of life - I use mutliple File Managers!!
Power Desk

Last post Author Topic: What's your preferred File Manager  (Read 455539 times)

Darwin

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Re: What's your preferred File Manager
« Reply #175 on: January 17, 2008, 12:27 AM »
That was kind of frightening, actually. I initially bumped each choice down and inserted Power Desk after AB Commander. That resulted (obviously with hindsight) in Power Desk having 17 votes and Variety is the Spice of Life none! As mentioned earlier, I wish I could retro-actively enable the "allow user to change vote" option... I'm DEFINITELY in the Variety camp now (though in fairness I do use DOpus 9 by default and especially when I'm in a hurry (because I know what I am doing with it).

J-Mac

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Re: What's your preferred File Manager
« Reply #176 on: January 22, 2008, 01:20 AM »
Grrr...  I am about to give XYplorer a try.  DOpus is driving me nuts with the Context menu!  [Caution - Major Childish Rant]

I have been using the DOpus context menu instead of the Windows one, mainly because I have so many extraneous items on the Windows Context menu.  (Darned programs that silently place one, two, or six items there without asking!).  I recently decided to go back to the Windows menu, however, because there are a few items that I often need and I cannot find out how to add them to DOpus's menu.  Their "tutorial" gives a basic "you can do it" but doesn't explain how very well.

But now I remember why I had to ditch the Windows menu to start with: In DOpus it can take as long as a full minute to open!?!?  Back when I first got DOpus I figured I must be doing something very wrong, but there are quite a few posts about this on their forum, so it's not just me.

Today I needed to rename a handful of photos, and as soon as I right-clicked on the first one in DOpus and started waiting, and then remembered about the delay.....  Man that takes long!! Why is that? Anyone know?  And no - it is not network shares taking that long. I already disabled them trying to speed things up - didn't happen. In Windows Explorer you can double-click slowly on a filename to rename it: One click, then another after a very short delay. But I can't do that in DOpus.  Or to be correct, I can't do that on image files in DOpus - others I can. Image files want to open in a viewer - no matter the speed or delay of the double-click.  After two renames - there were only about 5 or 6 so I didn't want to open BRU to do it - I got fed up and decided to open Total Commander to rename them.

Yep - Total Commander...  Haven;t opened this since I got DOpus.  Oops! Forgot, right-clicking is a no-no in TC.  OK.... Let's see......  How in the HECK do I rename files in TC???!!?  Of course I did remember after all - but not until I opened the Help file and got to that page.  Seems we just can't remember this stuff until we go through the trouble of looking up the Help topic - and then remember it without having to read the Help topic!!!

Anyway I got all renamed, but not without some heartburn obviously!  But I then sat there and started to wonder why I hadn't decided to try going with Total Commander full time.  After all, I have had the license for a lot of years.  Then I tried to customize it a bit and remembered just how different he has configured TC from the rest of the crowd!  OK, there are always bound to be some differences in how developers think when they design their own version of a relatively common software type.  But where in the world did Christian pull some of these commands and menu structures from?? I could swear I saw our local community college offering an advanced certificate course - 65 continuing education credits - on "Setting Up, Understanding, and Working With Total Commander".  (Caution - bring your own pillow; There WILL BE much banging of your head on walls)"!!

Can it get much more difficult with XYPlorer??  Nosh??

Jim

Dormouse

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Re: What's your preferred File Manager
« Reply #177 on: January 22, 2008, 02:53 AM »

Today I needed to rename a handful of photos, and as soon as I right-clicked on the first one in DOpus and started waiting, and then remembered about the delay.....  Man that takes long!! Why is that? Anyone know? 
-J-Mac link=topic=9958.msg97787#msg97787

This is not a problem I understand. Images don't try to open when I right-click on them and there is no delay before I can rename them. Network drives present too. What aren't I understanding?
« Last Edit: January 22, 2008, 04:55 AM by Dormouse »

tomos

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Re: What's your preferred File Manager
« Reply #178 on: January 22, 2008, 03:09 AM »
I've heard of the slow context menu J-Mac - had it to a certain extent on my last computer (the longer the install the worse it got..) but never that bad
Would drive me mad alright :tellme:

Re changing filenames for a series of files, a good trick in DOpus is:-
Select file
Press F2
Name part gets selected - rename
DONT press return -
Press down arrow and next file is selected, editable and ready for rename
and so on down the list

I presume you know that when filename is editable, that right arrow brings you to end of name but before the dot, for adding suffix:
Filename|.ext
Left arrow brings you to beginning of name
*********         

That problem with images is extremely odd - all images ?? 
Have you reported it as a bug?
What's your default viewer? - have you changed it lately ?
(I ask cause I had problems after setting ExifPro as default viewer :-\ - but not like that problem..)
Tom

Darwin

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Re: What's your preferred File Manager
« Reply #179 on: January 22, 2008, 07:31 AM »
I have the context menu problem in DOpus 9 as well but completely the reverse of J-Mac's problem (which is odd). If I disable Windows Explorer entries from displaying in the DOpus context menu it takes up to 15 seconds for the Context Menu to appear. If I leave the default settings in place and have both appear, the context menu appears instanteously.

There IS a way to invoke the context menu in TC, Jim, and people keep posting to tell me how to do it... I keep forgetting, though  :-[ Drives me batty as well...

Dirhael

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Re: What's your preferred File Manager
« Reply #180 on: January 22, 2008, 07:49 AM »
I have the context menu problem in DOpus 9 as well but completely the reverse of J-Mac's problem (which is odd). If I disable Windows Explorer entries from displaying in the DOpus context menu it takes up to 15 seconds for the Context Menu to appear. If I leave the default settings in place and have both appear, the context menu appears instanteously.

There IS a way to invoke the context menu in TC, Jim, and people keep posting to tell me how to do it... I keep forgetting, though  :-[ Drives me batty as well...

If you want to have the context-menu available from a right-click, just make sure that you set the following in the TC configuration.
Registered nurse by day, hobby programmer by night.

tomos

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Re: What's your preferred File Manager
« Reply #181 on: January 22, 2008, 08:13 AM »
I have the context menu problem in DOpus 9 as well but completely the reverse of J-Mac's problem (which is odd). If I disable Windows Explorer entries from displaying in the DOpus context menu it takes up to 15 seconds for the Context Menu to appear. If I leave the default settings in place and have both appear, the context menu appears instanteously.

is it possible to have something in DOpus context but not in windows context menu - and that *it* could be causing the problem?
Tom

Darwin

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Re: What's your preferred File Manager
« Reply #182 on: January 22, 2008, 08:14 AM »
Thanks Dirhael! I'm doing this NOW, before I forget... again  :-[

I could argue that it's sleep deprivation, but I suspect it's just age  :o

Darwin

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Re: What's your preferred File Manager
« Reply #183 on: January 22, 2008, 08:17 AM »
is it possible to have something in DOpus context but not in windows context menu - and that *it* could be causing the problem?

Thanks for the suggestion, Tom. AFAICT, though, there's nothing in my "DOpus only" context menu that isn't in the combined context menu. I'm so used to having to scroll through my context menu now that it doesn't bother me, but I should take a look into WHY this is happening, because it does fly in the face of other users' experiences and intuition!

Darwin

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Re: What's your preferred File Manager
« Reply #184 on: January 22, 2008, 08:22 AM »
I-N-T-E-R-E-S-T-I-N-G (is this the most overused word in the English language? No? I'd like to nominate it, along with genius, and hero as the three most overused words). I've enabled the context menu in TC and (drumroll) it takes at least 30 seconds to appear!

J-Mac, given the above discussion, I'd be very interested in hearing how long the context menu takes to appear in you TC installation? FWIW, I tried this in my TC "only" installation, and not in the TC UP installation, though in the interest of being thorough, I'm off to give that a whirl as well. I am not optimistic.

Darwin

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Re: What's your preferred File Manager
« Reply #185 on: January 22, 2008, 08:29 AM »
Well, it appears that the load time for the context menu in both TC (vanilla) and TC UP is depends on the type of file that you are selecting. In both TC and TC UP load times are pretty much instant for files, but take a bit longer ~5 seconds for folders. That 30 second wait that I experienced intitially was for a folder and another process (DoubleKiller Pro) was tagging my anaemic single core CPU.

lanux128

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Re: What's your preferred File Manager
« Reply #186 on: January 22, 2008, 09:11 AM »
I've enabled the context menu in TC and (drumroll) it takes at least 30 seconds to appear!

Darwin, when i read the above i immediately recalled this context-menu problem i had with SC but then you had already found out the reason for the delay.. :Thmbsup: btw, i have only vanilla TC and the appearance of the context-menu is consistent regardless of file-type.

J-Mac

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Re: What's your preferred File Manager
« Reply #187 on: January 22, 2008, 11:18 AM »
I-N-T-E-R-E-S-T-I-N-G (is this the most overused word in the English language? No? I'd like to nominate it, along with genius, and hero as the three most overused words). I've enabled the context menu in TC and (drumroll) it takes at least 30 seconds to appear!

J-Mac, given the above discussion, I'd be very interested in hearing how long the context menu takes to appear in you TC installation? FWIW, I tried this in my TC "only" installation, and not in the TC UP installation, though in the interest of being thorough, I'm off to give that a whirl as well. I am not optimistic.
Darwin:  Context menu in TC - with the Options changed as in the screenshot above - took 7 seconds the first time - immediate after that.  Pretty darned quick actually! Thanks Dirhael!

Also, I lost my TC-UP installation file.  Downloaded a few times & kept losing it!  Thought I was going even crazier!  Looking further into it I found that NOD32 is eating it up as soon as I download it - and without any notification. I swear, NOD32 keeps falling lower on the A-V Test sites, and it also keeps eating files that I want!!  (Doggone program is starting to act like the old Norton monster!).

Tom:  Thanks for the F2 tip - I didn't even think of that.  Next time maybe...   :)

Dormouse:  I have no idea what you mean. Either you misunderstood my post, or I'm misunderstanding yours!!  Let me think on it and I'll post back to you.  :)

Jim


J-Mac

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Re: What's your preferred File Manager
« Reply #188 on: January 22, 2008, 11:27 AM »

Today I needed to rename a handful of photos, and as soon as I right-clicked on the first one in DOpus and started waiting, and then remembered about the delay.....  Man that takes long!! Why is that? Anyone know?
-J-Mac link=topic=9958.msg97787#msg97787

This is not a problem I understand. Images don't try to open when I right-click on them and there is no delay before I can rename them. Network drives present too. What aren't I understanding?

OK - I re-read all and I do see what you are missing - I think!  Right-clicking in DOpus doesn't open anything; all it does - for me, anyway - is take real long.  That is, if I use the standard Windows context menu.  If I use the DOpus context menu it opens fast, but that menu is missing a lot of items I need to use.

What I meant about the images opening is:  You know how in regular, old Windows Explorer if you left-click on a filename and then after a very short wait, left-click on it again, the filename is highlighted and you can rename the file?  (Of course quickly double-clicking opens the file). Try it in Explorer - Left-click, and then again after a brief (less than a second) delay. Instead of opening the filename is highlighted for renaming.

I was trying that in DOpus, and it works on most files, but it won't work on image files. As a matter of fact it looks like if I have the appearance set as Thumbnails, it opens every time.  (Probably something to do with the Lister Content feature, the one where it tries to look at the folder contents and applies the appropriate file-viewing  mode.  BTW, this has never worked well either!!)  If the Lister is in Details or a similar mode it goes into rename with a slow double-click.

Hope this helps!

Jim

Darwin

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Re: What's your preferred File Manager
« Reply #189 on: January 22, 2008, 12:16 PM »
Hi Jim - re: TC UP. Bitdefender goes crazy over a number of files contained in my TC UP installation. I ran a trial of ESET Security Suite earlier this month before going with BitDefender and it didn't like elements of the TC UP install, either. Both of them complained about files in the "Programs" folder of TC UP. Revelation was one, I don't remember the others. I just let my AV disinfect/delete the files and removed the offending programmes as I use none of them anyway. The next time I install TC UP, I am going to do it clean and be very selective about the additional programmes it installs - I like the GUI improvements and the additional menus but am not really fussed about a lot of the additional 3rd party software (though note: it is nice to have the entire package installed to a thumbdrive).

Armando

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Re: What's your preferred File Manager
« Reply #190 on: January 22, 2008, 12:30 PM »
Looking further into it I found that NOD32 is eating it up as soon as I download it - and without any notification. I swear, NOD32 keeps falling lower on the A-V Test sites, and it also keeps eating files that I want!!  (Doggone program is starting to act like the old Norton monster!).

I've had some nasty performance problems with both NOD32 AND Comodo. See this thread:-*

Darwin

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Re: What's your preferred File Manager
« Reply #191 on: January 22, 2008, 12:42 PM »
I was disappointed by the ESET Security Suite demo (it contains NOD32 as the AV component). It started out GREAT but after a reboot it was terribly slow, a resource hog. I left it for a week but it never got any better (I thought it might need to "learn" my usage patterns or something). Anyway, switched to demo of Bitdefender AV and did the same. I was able to tweak it to be quite inobtrusive and bought a licence - it's made a dramatic improvement to my wife's notebook. It's also relegated Webroot AV and AS to an afterthought on my machine (and completely uninstalled from my wife's) despite my dual licence for it expiring in Novmber 2009. Bitdefender is simply that much less resource hungry. I do use Webroot for a weekly manual scan, though...

Apologies for the OT digression...

J-Mac

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Re: What's your preferred File Manager
« Reply #192 on: January 22, 2008, 01:42 PM »
I was disappointed by the ESET Security Suite demo (it contains NOD32 as the AV component). It started out GREAT but after a reboot it was terribly slow, a resource hog. I left it for a week but it never got any better (I thought it might need to "learn" my usage patterns or something). Anyway, switched to demo of Bitdefender AV and did the same. I was able to tweak it to be quite inobtrusive and bought a licence - it's made a dramatic improvement to my wife's notebook. It's also relegated Webroot AV and AS to an afterthought on my machine (and completely uninstalled from my wife's) despite my dual licence for it expiring in Novmber 2009. Bitdefender is simply that much less resource hungry. I do use Webroot for a weekly manual scan, though...

Apologies for the OT digression...

A quick add to the digression:  I did not take the upgrade (small cost) to the security suite - stuck with the AV only. And I also did not take the upgrade to NOD32 V3, but stuck with V2.7.  V3, if you read their forum at Wilder's, still seems to be riddled with problems for more users than normally have issues after a new release.  And one big problem I DO have with Eset is if you do encounter a problem, support is no help at all, often not responding to support tickets.  Personally I have never received a reply from Eset support other than the autoresponder when you first submit a problem.  I have gotten better responses by calling them on the phone, but technical support is not available that way; only sales and licensing.

Not sure what I'll go with next.

OK - all done with OT!

Jim

Armando

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Re: What's your preferred File Manager
« Reply #193 on: January 22, 2008, 01:44 PM »
Bitdefender AV and did the same. I was able to tweak it to be quite inobtrusive and bought a licence - it's made a dramatic improvement to my wife's notebook. It's also relegated Webroot AV and AS to an afterthought on my machine (and completely uninstalled from my wife's) despite my dual licence for it expiring in Novmber 2009. Bitdefender is simply that much less resource hungry. I do use Webroot for a weekly manual scan, though...

[off topic]Thanks Darwin. I'll have a look at bit defender if/when I'll have the energy for it. Seems like an interesting product. I also read about Online Armor and it seems worth trying... Maybe an Online Armor + Bitdefender combination[/off topic]

desslok

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Re: What's your preferred File Manager
« Reply #194 on: January 22, 2008, 01:56 PM »
Hi, I'm a new member.

Explorer beats many of the so-called Explorer alternatives on the list hands down simply because they can't handle unicode. Renaming and displaying file info correctly are such basic operations in file managers that it's puzzling that people are paying for file managers that can't do those operations correctly despite other extra niceties. You know, when it comes to music files, Winamp and foobar can handle unicode fine, and they are free. (Those who say, "I don't need unicode," broaden your music library to "world" music.)

Some of the file managers on the list can be made portable, but you never know what's in the box unitl you plug your managers in. They can't handle unicode? To me, that defeats the merit of portability significantly.

Having said that, Dopus seems to still have some issues with unicode, so xplorer2 is probably the only manager that's worth mentioning in my opinion.

Dirhael

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Re: What's your preferred File Manager
« Reply #195 on: January 22, 2008, 06:52 PM »
Having said that, Dopus seems to still have some issues with unicode, so xplorer2 is probably the only manager that's worth mentioning in my opinion.

Heh, not once have I encountered a problem with Dopus + unicode files (I haven't heard of anyone else with a problem either until you, now), and I deal with filenames almost daily in anything from Norwegian to Russian, Korean, Chinese and more. I also have a license for SpeedCommander 12, and I've never had a problem with that one either. In fact, I've encountered more problems with filenames and such in Explorer than I've ever had with either Dopus or SC12.
Registered nurse by day, hobby programmer by night.

Dormouse

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Re: What's your preferred File Manager
« Reply #196 on: January 22, 2008, 07:05 PM »
What I meant about the images opening is:  You know how in regular, old Windows Explorer if you left-click on a filename and then after a very short wait, left-click on it again, the filename is highlighted and you can rename the file?  (Of course quickly double-clicking opens the file). Try it in Explorer - Left-click, and then again after a brief (less than a second) delay. Instead of opening the filename is highlighted for renaming.

I was trying that in DOpus, and it works on most files, but it won't work on image files.

DOpus works just like that on image files for me.

Darwin

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Re: What's your preferred File Manager
« Reply #197 on: January 22, 2008, 07:09 PM »
Yes, I can confirm that DOpus 9 behaves as expected when "delay double-clicking" (a technical term) an image file (ie the result is that the filename is highlighted allowing me to rename the image file).

infimum

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Re: What's your preferred File Manager
« Reply #198 on: January 22, 2008, 08:14 PM »
(I haven't heard of anyone else with a problem either until you, now)

Check the Dopus thread then.
https://www.donation...ex.php?topic=8056.75

J-Mac

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Re: What's your preferred File Manager
« Reply #199 on: January 22, 2008, 11:43 PM »
Yes, I can confirm that DOpus 9 behaves as expected when "delay double-clicking" (a technical term) an image file (ie the result is that the filename is highlighted allowing me to rename the image file).

Dormouse, Darwin:  Then I now have to check all through my DOpus preferences to see what I have selected - or deselected in there that might affect this.

When I found issues with the content thing that DOpus does I was on their forum for a while and as a result they had me changing a lot of settings to do with images.  Looks like one of them might be doing this.

Thanks.

Jim