XYplorer Beta Club

Filehero wrote:

admin wrote: Sounds interesting?

Sounds great!

And with Thumbnails Deluxe I can do all my photo image preview stuff completely in XY .....

What's your opinion about a Detached Preview Window as opposed to the Special Function "Preview" Tab? The Detached Preview Window would allow to have Find Files AND both Panels AND the Preview open, all at the same time if your monitor(s) is big enough.

admin wrote:What's your opinion about a Detached Preview Window as opposed to the Special Function "Preview" Tab? The Detached Preview Window would allow to have Find Files AND both Panels AND the Preview open, all at the same time if your monitor(s) is big enough.

admin wrote:I see your point but I'm not a friend of a detached and freely movable extra form. It seems to open a new box of problems concerning windows management etc.

I guess 'detached' means a second top level window, right? Just like the GIMP panels? Noooooo!

My general rationale behind:
In terms of usability and efficiency I see absolutely no point in an application having more than one main/root window (container) on a one-monitor setup. Switching through open applications quickly is simply possible anymore. Thats the reason why I never gave GIMP a try for longer than 15 minutes.
However, on a two-monitor environment this might be different. Though I still don't see why I would need a (third) detachable XY preview window I can imagine why others would. Horses for courses.

Despite of implementation complexitiy and efforts: Making detachability optional appears to be the silver bullet.


Cheers,
Filehero

Filehero wrote:I guess 'detached' means a second top level window, right?

Exactly. I just saw that "Floating Preview Window" (FPW) is a much more common term for this.

Yes, it would be an optional addition to the current Preview tab. I'm not sure ATM if I would make both, an FPW and a Special Function "Preview" Tab.

Don out of curiosity, have you played with any of the versions of Visual Studio from 2008 to present?

Personally I find that Microsoft's windowing system and docking panels work extremely well.
It's not unique to them, as Eclipse is very similar in this regard, and I wouldn't presume to claim they do it best, but they have made a lot of these components/controls easily available to developers using their tools.

It's that flexibility of having everything visible in one or multiple windows and being able to expand and collapse things at will that really allows the user to find their own sweet spot on using their screen real estate however they please.

And they even allow the user to move many of their panes into the main tabbed document area, similar to the SFTs you describe.

Yeah, but I don't use Microsoft of whatever other components or controls.

And a 2nd floating window, optionally docked/glued to the main window, is not that difficult to do. Trivial actually.

I'd definitely be in favor of an optional, floating preview (and search?) window. I currently use dual pane (top/bottom) and often have the Find panel open and want to preview the found files. This sounds like it'd address that desire perfectly!

If the previewed file is text, I'd love to be able to search/highlight text in the preview window as well.

Thanks!

admin wrote:I'm not sure ATM if I would make both, an FPW and a Special Function "Preview" Tab.

from my point of view SFPT gives much more abilities, so i'd stand for that + as a long time TC user, i feel much comfort in using second panel as preview/search/etc.
concerning docking: not a promotion in any maner, but one of the best docking abilities i found in file-managers are in CubicExplorer. Don, if you have any interest, check it out.

Plus one for PeterH's suggestion:

could you think about the ability to include a windows "command window" ("DOS") in a tab?

There was a Code Project tool written (here) that added a command prompt into windows explorer as a explorer bar which worked quite well.

In 2012, TaxManCA (Matt) asked if there was a way to position the ‘Info Panel’ on the right side instead of on the bottom of the screen? I found this page Googling exactly this question.

I want to preview my files to the right, not at the bottom of the screen. Is there any way to do this yet?

Michael

No, the IP is a horizontal interface. The preview tab is just one part of it. I added the Floating Preview for a more flexible approach to vertical previewing.

admin wrote:No projected time frame.

BTW, I recently had a revolutionary idea: The user "declares" a tab (preferably on the 2nd pane) as "Preview Tab", e.g. by relocating it to some pseudo path (e.g.: :preview:). This tab will preview any file selected in the 1st pane. One of the advantages of this approach is that you can have the Find Files tab open at the same time as the Preview. Sounds interesting?

What happened to this great idea?

For me Floating Preview doesn't work, because it doesn't support Web & Office Files and the Infopanel is too narrow to preview Web & Office Files. I know I can expand the Infopanel, but then again list browsing get's very painful.
Right now I'm using another file manager to preview folders for Web & Office Files, but it's breaking up my workflow

Yes, this is still somewhere on my staple of lists of great ideas. Unfortunately there is the world cup now.

Aha, OK.

I just realised that I can click on a file I want to preview and click Ctrl+Q, which will temporarily open the IP with a preview. I can then click Ctrl+Q again to close it. This works relatively well.

The only problem now is speed: it takes about 10 seconds to generate a preview every time. Hmm. That's not great. I am doing my taxes today and so need to quickly preview hundreds of Office files. Does anyone here know of any super-fast Office file previewing apps or addons or sth that work well together with XYplorer?

Michael

10 seconds! That ridiculously slow. Hard to say why this happens, too many possible factors. You might check out a trial version of QVP: http://www.xyplorer.com/faq-topic.php?id=QVP

This is my favorite: http://www.uvviewsoft.com/
Total Commander plugin, but it also integrates nicely into other file managers. Haven't figured out yet how to smuggle it into XY. But you can also use it standalone.