Main Area and Open Discussion > General Software Discussion
Configuring Directory Opus for Fun and Profit
cyberdiva:
Frankly, it's usually all I can do just to learn how to use DOpus as it is, without any tweaks. But I did make one small tweak to the Toolbar: I added several icons for programs such as Photoshop and InPaint and set them up so that if I selected a photo file (or several) and clicked on, say, the InPaint icon on the toolbar, InPaint would open with that photo file loaded.
To add a program to the DOpus toolbar, you first right-click on the toolbar and select "Customise." While in Customise mode, you can simply drag a program's shortcut to the toolbar. Then, to get the program to open a selected file, while still in Customise mode edit the program icon (Alt+left click) and add {allfilepath} to the end of whatever is already in the Function box. Thus, my Function box for InPaint now contains the following: @async:"C:\Program Files (x86)\Inpaint4\Inpaint.exe"{allfilepath}
Innuendo:
Thanks for all the tips so far...this is what I'm talking about. I've got some ideas myself about customizing DOpus...just have to figure them out in my head, implement them, and then I'll be sharing here.
4wd, I'm going to be dating myself here, but I used DOpus extensively on the Amiga and...I even started using it with v1.0. *gasp*
oblivion:
I've been using DOpus since v8 (which I bought into after picking up a freebie copy of v6, as I recall) and I've never really done much customisation beyond putting the stuff I use most on the toolbar.
My biggest bit of proper customisation involved beefing up the Multiview plugin so that it could do absolutely everything I threw at it -- which in my case involved .DBF files, which nothing I'd had since Quickview had been able to do.
A bit of general advice: if you want to put program shortcuts on a toolbar, you'll probably be better off having buttons that open menus and putting the shortcuts in the menus. That way you can organise in the way your mind works (or in categories based on your personal various operating modes, or whatever suits) rather than a toolbar that gradually becomes increasingly cluttered.
A thought-about and organised list of favourites is also A Good Thing if, like me, you have a zillion folders serving different purposes and want to be able to zip between them.
Some other tiny things:
If you don't have a button that toggles checkbox mode on and off, add it. Appallingly useful any time you're picking up files from a folder that can only be grouped by your brain and if you're -- like me -- occasionally inclined to click instead of ctrl-click and zap the list of 87 disparate files you've carefully selected over the last ten minutes.
Your default downloads folder: add the "relative age" to the shown columns, sort it (in reverse) so the newest files are always at the top and save the view for it (and optionally, all subfolders). That way, if you're picking stuff up off the net, intending to get to them later, you'll know that the top handful of files are the ones you'll be playing with when you get to them. The relative age bit is a brilliant visual indicator for things that are getting old enough to delete on the odd occasions you go through your downloads to tidy up all the stuff you don't need anymore -- old GiveAwayOfTheDay downloads you forgot to delete after the relevant day passed, all that sort of cruft.
If you use zipfiles to keep/archive stuff in, you can create a new/empty zipfile, open it on one side of a dual-pane lister, navigate the other side to the place the source files are coming from, select the source, hit the "move from source to destination" button and you're done. I don't like the way pretty much every other archiver manages its interface in comparison -- although I grant they have their strengths for people who like drag'n'drop.
Um. Set it to load at startup, not to display the splash screen, get used to the bit of advanced wonderfulness of having a lister there when you need it just by double-clicking the desktop.
Opus just gradually takes over. I'm quite sure I haven't used (or even mentioned) any of its more advanced features, the bits of scripted cleverness above are beyond anything I've ever tried to do...
cyberdiva:
A bit of general advice: if you want to put program shortcuts on a toolbar, you'll probably be better off having buttons that open menus and putting the shortcuts in the menus. That way you can organise in the way your mind works (or in categories based on your personal various operating modes, or whatever suits) rather than a toolbar that gradually becomes increasingly cluttered.
-oblivion (January 03, 2012, 06:03 AM)
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In general, I don't mind having to right-click on a file and scroll down to choose the non-default program I want to use to open it. There are just a few programs where I prefer to skip the scroll step and have the file open immediately in the non-default program. Thus, I'm in no danger of having too many program icons on the toolbar. If I put menus on the toolbar and had to select a program from the menu, I might as well use the right-click context menu and skip the toolbar.
Nudel:
Check out the various Downloads / Tutorials areas on the Opus forums for people's shared configs, advice, etc. Lots of good stuff there. There's also a very long & detailed customization tutorial soon to be posted by one of the forum members, who let me see a draft copy recently, so keep an eye out for that.
partly because the DOpus authors have finally caved on their long-time insistence that they'd never write archive plugins for either RAR and ZIP (and let's face it, their support for RAR in the past has been very weak and very much and after-thought)-Innuendo (January 02, 2012, 02:32 PM)
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I think there's some misunderstanding there. :)
Opus has never needed a Zip archive plugin because Zip support has always been built-in. (If my memory serves me, that's been the case since the first Windows version more than a decade ago.
(Maybe you meant 7z rather than Zip? But nobody ever refused to write a 7z plugin either. It took until Opus 10 to happen but that wasn't for lack of desire.)
As for RAR, Opus has had a RAR archive plugin since seven or eight years ago.
It's possible I've forgotten a very old statement but I don't think anyone ever insisted that archive plugins would not be written, for any filetype. Adding the archive/VFS plugin API back in 2004 (or whenever it was) would've been pretty pointless if the aim was to never write any plugins for it. :)
There were issues with making the RAR plugin anything other than read-only, because while the RAR decompression code is available for anyone to use/licence, the RAR compression code is not made available to anyone in the world, for love nor money, except to RARLabs themselves. We've always wished the code was available and always wanted a fully read-write RAR plugin but it's also always been impossible to write it how we wanted to.
In Opus 10 we addressed that by making Opus able to automate WinRAR.exe, if it is available, to modify RAR archives. (Extraction is still done without WinRAR, as it always was.) Automating WinRAR is a kludge and something we were reluctant to do, but I have to admit it works pretty well in the end. It's not perfect but it's better than I thought it would be. (It was me who wrote the code to do it and I was not sure, until it was finished, if it would work well enough to release, or if it would provide any real value over simply using the WinRAR context menus which already worked with Opus. In the end it did both and was worth spending the time on. I'd still re-write the code to use a RAR compression library if one actually existed, though.)
Like probably every tool except RAR/WinRAR itself, support for updating RAR files isn't as good as for updating Zip, 7z, TAR, etc. For example, some complex operations have to be done, behind the scenes, in multiple stages instead of in a single update. (While Opus handles the details and sets up each stage of the operation automatically, it means some RAR updates take longer than similar updates for other archive formats. There are also some things you can do in Opus with other archive formats that you cannot do with RAR, due to limitations of what WinRAR can be asked to do. For example, you cannot rename files on the fly while adding them to RAR archives. But, on the whole, modifying RAR archives via Opus works well. (Unless there are loads of complaints that nobody has sent in. :-))
I think Total Commander does something similar, with RAR.exe instead of WinRAR.exe. I went with WinRAR.exe at the time because it had better Unicode support (not sure if that's still the case with RAR 4) and so that any errors from the RAR program could appear in the program's UI. (The WinRAR UI is kept hidden normally, though; you see standard Opus progress dialogs instead.)
Automating (Win)RAR.exe is as good as anyone can realistically do unless the makers of RAR become willing to licence their proprietary compression algorithms as is done for other archive formats. I've long wished for them to do that, but also long given up hope that it will happen, and for that reason I still personally choose and advocate using other archive formats over RAR, but I can't change what other people want.
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