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Listary 6

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Nod5:
Does any news about Listary 6 suggest that it will get something akin to FARR's powerful alias system?

IainB:
Does any news about Listary 6 suggest that it will get something akin to FARR's powerful alias system?
-Nod5 (August 19, 2018, 02:02 PM)
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Yers, I wondered about that as well.
FARR and Listary are not the same things though, so a comparison is difficult. It rather depends on one's requirements.
From my perspective as an existing FARR user: I had trialled Listary for a couple of years out of interest and for comparison with FARR, but eventually dumped Listary, though the latter worked OK. Listary met my requirements for searches, but otherwise seemed annoyingly idiosyncratic and intrusive, popping up when I didn't need it and nagging me to buy a licence for the full version. The most useful thing about it for me was the search functionality, but I preferred Everything Search for that.
I stuck with FARR rather than Listary, because in general it better suits my peculiar needs/purposes, including, for example (not an exhaustive list):

* it is portable (used on all the PCs I support);
* it uses few/minimal resources when operating;
* it is stable and works consistently well and with no idiosyncrasies;
* it is fast/responsive;
* it generally feels ergonomically better - e.g., more intuitive and less intrusive than Listary;
* it seems to be generally more powerful than Listary (FARR having a comprehensive range of options, settings, plugins);
* it seems to be more fully under the user's control than Listary;
* it has the TinyEverything plugin for searches (I find Everything to be the fastest and most optimal search tool, though I use Google Desktop Search for complex searches);
* it can be kept automatically updated along with all the other related apps. - via DCUpdater.

rjbull:
Does any news about Listary 6 suggest that it will get something akin to FARR's powerful alias system?
-Nod5 (August 19, 2018, 02:02 PM)
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I wondered about that as well.
FARR and Listary are not the same things though, so a comparison is difficult. It rather depends on one's requirements.
-IainB (August 19, 2018, 03:53 PM)
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Very much so.

From my perspective as an existing FARR user: I had trialled Listary for a couple of years out of interest and for comparison with FARR, but eventually dumped Listary, though the latter worked OK. -IainB (August 19, 2018, 03:53 PM)
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I'm a long-term registered user of Listary, since (I think) the first time it was on Bits du Jour.  I'm still using Listary 4 on my old laptop. In fact Listary had all the features I really wanted by version 3.  I tend to 'live inside' my file manager, Total Commander, and Listary's magic ability to point a standard Windows dialog box to whatever directory was active in TC was worth the price of entry on its own.  I haven't used Listary's global search abilities; I occasionally use Everything, but rarely need global search.

By contrast, I more or less dumped FARR about ten years ago, when I realised

a) it had a 20 Mb footprint; I know people act as if disk space is infinite, but it seemed an awful lot for a launcher, the more so as the first PC I ever used (in 1988) only had a 20 Mb hard disk.  For everything.
b) At that time I only seemed to use about 30 programs on a regular basis, very easy to put into a standard launcher, and anything else could be found and launched via Total Commander.  As launcher I chose Horst Schaeffer's PopSel. My current laptop's PopSel menus have almost 200 items, plus the System menu included in the archive, and occupies about 210 Kb.  I would probably have liked SlickRun a lot if I'd found it earlier.
c) I didn't want to wrestle with FARR's  alias system.

Listary met my requirements for searches, but otherwise seemed annoyingly idiosyncratic and intrusive, popping up when I didn't need it and nagging me to buy a licence for the full version. The most useful thing about it for me was the search functionality, but I preferred Everything Search for that.
I stuck with FARR rather than Listary, because in general it better suits my peculiar needs/purposes-IainB (August 19, 2018, 03:53 PM)
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Your "peculiar needs/purposes" rubbing up against Listary's "idiosyncrasies" sounds like the pot calling the kettle black...  It might be nice if Listary's default was not to pop up except for opted-in programs, but I suppose that would defeat the object.  I don't know the behaviour of the free version, but after two years of trialling I think it's entitled to a nag screen.  Listary is still only $19.95 at full price - for me, one of the best software deals around - and comes up on Bits du Jour now and again at even less.

[FARR] is portable (used on all the PCs I support)
-IainB (August 19, 2018, 03:53 PM)
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Listary has a portable version, listed on the download page.  If the PCs you support are for work, though, you'd need registered copies for each.

FARR having a comprehensive range of options, settings, plugins)
-IainB (August 19, 2018, 03:53 PM)
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Intimidatingly so, especially for new or casual users, or anyone in a hurry...

Tuxman:
a) it had a 20 Mb footprint; I know people act as if disk space is infinite, but it seemed an awful lot for a launcher, the more so as the first PC I ever used (in 1988) only had a 20 Mb hard disk.  For everything.
-rjbull (August 27, 2018, 04:22 PM)
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Ha! I find it amazing that I'm not the only one around who can't understand why the solution to performance problems is to just throw more hardware at it...

IainB:
@Tuxman:
Where you write:
Ha! I find it amazing that I'm not the only one around who can't understand why the solution to performance problems is to just throw more hardware at it...
_______________________________
-Tuxman (August 27, 2018, 04:41 PM)
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I suspect that you're far from being alone in this. The trouble seems to be that, whilst writing elegant resource-efficient code may have been a kind of ideal, it was not - for whatever reason - necessarily a practice/consideration that was taught or encouraged in programming 101. So it was less likely to be a design objective. Maybe it was pragmatic. At the same time, the level of complexity and OS subsystem compartmentalisation has tended to increase, making it difficult/impossible  to simplify/rationalise code in any event. One suspects that this probably could have resulted - in part at least - in the generation of an awful lot of unplanned fat bloated software, with often perhaps redundant/unneeded (by the user) functionality. However the latter might, for example (say) usefully fulfil some tangential marketing objective far removed from original user requirements, or be something that the developers might have bolted on as they thought it was simply "a good idea" or a lazy shortcut (for themselves) at the time.
You can arguably sometimes see this when you make comparisons between different systems or software or versions of software products that tend to overlap in functionality.

On efficiency of resource utilisation, I never made a note of Listary's disk or RAM or CPU utilisation, but, after checking just now, FARR seems to take:
Disk: approx. 12.5Mb in its root folder (not counting the plugins and associated apps).
RAM: varies intermittently, roughly 20 - 35Mb, depending on how it is configured and what it is doing.
CPU: varies intermittently, roughly 0-5%, depending on what it is doing.

Not sure how that might compare with Listary, or even whether it would be relevant to make such a comparison (being two somewhat similar, but different things).

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