Dealing with many files and folders.

[Stretto]

I have about 10M files(probably more)(about 20TB worth of stuff from music, science, programming, etc).

The biggest problem I've been running in to lately is just dealing with the tree view.

What happens is that over time as I open folders they will persist and remain open. I usually want this because I'm moving thing around between different folders or looking for things and just need them open. Even windows dirs might have a ton of folders.

Eventually though there are so many that if I need to drag a file to a folder in the tree I have to hunt for the folder.

It's a bit hard to explain how it comes about and I know there are ways to fix it(such as minimize all folders, but I don't want to do that since I want to keep some open).

I think there is a better solution, or two:

1. Some quick way to navigate to drives of folders. I have to use the mouse and drag to the bottom of the tree view to get things to start scrolling and if I have a few large folders open with several thousands sub-folders this then takes about 1 minute just to get to the drive I'm looking for.

I think if there was some "Jump list" to jump to a drive it would pretty much alleviate the problem.

There are two things I can think of to help with this:

1. Have some type of small "overview" bar. In visual studio(not sure if you use that) or some other code editors you can set the scroll bar to actually give the code, in a zoomed out form. You could do something like that or just do it for the drives(partition the drives in to rectangular regions on the scroll bar and if the mouse enters it and waits for 2 seconds then the tree is scrolled in to view of that drive(calculated by the mouse coords relative to the scroll bar and what drive that region represents).

Or have a side bar to the list(optional) that does something like that and when one enters it with the mouse it immediately scrolls(have a small gap between it and the list though so one doesn't accidentally hit it). This would allow for very fast navigation.
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but vertical. Could also display some type file information such as a sort of depth indicator to give more structure to the lay out(I know the structure of my system, it is just the speed to navigate it is the problem).

Hopefully it makes sense(I could draw an example to make it make sense).

2. Have the drive icons in small form above or below the tree view but with essentially the same behavior.

Clearly because we are dragging, when the mouse enters the "drive" it has to jump the tree view since we can't click because it would cancel the drag. Also, clicking could also jump. I think a small time out of 2-3 seconds would be fine and it could be minimizable.

I know I could setup hotkeys or write a script to help but I don't have this problem enough to justify trying to remember all that stuff but having a feature of xyplorer would get me to use it more and would also be there when I need it.

[Stretto]

Anything?

[highend]

You want something that (as it seems) nobody else has interest in. And you don't care enough to write a script that would solve your problem (if the <drive> groups for the toolbar buttons can't already do that). What do you expect?

[Stretto]

Well, it seems at some point in time the imbeciles were interested in fire, the internet, cars, whatever... just the way it is... sometimes you just have to kick their ass in to using it so they realize how good it is. I mean, what do you expect?