after being a XYplorer Pro license owner for 15 months I have to admit that I only use it rarely (and home and at work) even though I have nearly all features I want at my finger tips.
I guess one of the reasons is just the overwhelming number of features and configuration parameters. You discover something cool in the online docs (which are much more enjoyable than the image-free offline help pages) and wonder how greatly this could affect your workflow but then you read about another nice feature and then you find another gimmick and oops... you already have forgotten what the first feature was all about.
In such cases the online docs are not so great because if you don't know exactly the name of the feature, the long feature list in alphabetical order isn't useful at all.
And even if you have an idea where to look for, you still need to click up to 10 links to "what's new" documents of version 7 to 14 to find the right part of the description.
Why not just having an additional task oriented feature list rather than alphabetical order?
For example:
You want to rename a bunch of files? Here are the functions to choose from:
- Batch Rename with Preview
Edit Item Names by List
Exclude Extension on Rename
Serial Rename by Up/Down Key
Or are you looking for specific files? Have a look on this list:
- Click and Search™
Search Folders by Size
Search Results Caching
Search Templates
Find Files
Find by Content
Find by Type
Duplicate File Finder
Type Ahead Find (Find As You Type)
Paste and Find
- Shell Integration
Icon Overlays Support
Support of NTFS junctions
Support of NTFS symbolic links (Vista and later)
User Account Control (UAC)
Unicode-Compliant
Overlong Filenames Supported
I already started to make my own task oriented feature lists next to a small description as a quick reference. But those things could also be part of a public wiki with easy to find user generated content which we unfortunately don't have.
Beside those documentation issues (or rather its organization because the information is there) the software could make features & configuration parameters more accessible, too. I quite often spend a lot of time looking for an option that's hidden somewhere (even when I know it's there). But some of those are only accessible in the configuration window while others are only available in the application menu or are even hidden in a context menu of a button. And it gets really frustrating when one of those buttons is not part of your current toolbar setup...
I often wish to have a global "function/feature/config parameter/environment" search function like e.g. JetBrains IntelliJ IDE offers. You just press a shortcut and typing in part of the name of anything you want and the program makes some suggests already when you are typing. Then after pressing enter the software leads to the place where the option can be set. Right now this is only available in the configuration window (and its own options only) but not elsewhere.
By the way, one of the things which are really annoying is that action log / undo buffers are only triggered by file operations.
The whole program configuration is not undo-able so I often wonder what went wrong all of a sudden, especially when you accidentally enable something using a shortcut. And there is more: Even changes to scripts, custom functions, some filters, etc. are not logged anywhere. So if something went wrong I can't get back to the original.
Alternatively there could be separate lists of the last 10 options that I changed and the last 20 script changes (when leaving a script editor window).
Oh my gosh... how could this post get that long?
Robbson