XYplorer Beta Club

Just had a little idea. What about marking the recent say 8 or 12 or 16 positions in the tree like this (watch the "needles" at the left side of the tree). I think it would help me navigating through my recent folders without the need to visually scan a list of location strings in the Recent Locations menu.

+1
I think the pins would be visually helpful.

Pins, yes. What I always wanted to know: what's the difference between needles and pins?

Yes, I think they would be helpful as well though too many of them may have the opposite affect in that the tree may become cluttered, confusing or congested. I'd opt for only 4 myself in possibly a different color than treepath tracing. Pins usually have heads don't they? Needles do not.

another difference is that needles have a hole at the blunt end -- well, comparatively blunt -- for inserting threads, pins don't.

Needles could symbolize some feature that somehow links or binds different locations together.

Thanks, so "pins" is the fitting term.

BTW, I think I can improve the Recent Locations function itself. Currently, when you click yourself down to a deep-level folder, each step on the way is stored as "Recent Location". This is nonsense. Solution: If going from a folder to an immediate child folder, then replace that folder in the Recent Locations list by that child folder. Next beta...

UPDATE: Changed my mind about the above idea. Too smart, too confusing.

What about showing an appropriate popup subset of a Hotlist, when hovering over a pin attached to a collapsed branch under which at least one leaf has already been included in the Hotlist?

Maybe later, not in phase 1.

But how is your general impression? I must say I'm getting used to it.

As you probably remember, I am a heavy user of tabs and tabsets, as well as AutoOptimizeTreeRadical. In that scenario, I am not seeing much use for it. However, my wish would change this dramatically, because the Hotlist button is oft too far away from the mouse when over a tree (besides, a. the list is mostly long, even when nicely subdivided, as it is; b. another possibly already prepared tab is most of the time nearer then the Hotlist button). My wish would for me be a game changing functionality, combining in that way a direct tree browsing and tabs selections. Optically it is OK. Another possible refinement would be the green leaf coloring, based on the time of the last visit.

I like idea very much, but i don't know is it necessary horizontal lines...

It is, imagine you are using a 10 folder deep hierarchy and in the last one you have 20 folders. Do you really think that users can draw a horizontal line of that length (in their head) to assign the correct match? They probably can't...

OK, I didn't think about that. You have right for your described scenario. For my needs, I mostly don't use such deep folders structure.

The alignment of the pins seems to be slightly off vertically, or maybe it is intentional?, I use a narrow tree usually so it is more noticeable, here is an exaggerated screenshot (font zoomed):

Sightly off? This looks terrible!

Is your screen resolution as 125%?

Screen: 1920x1080, 1/1 (Primary), Virtual: (0, 0) - (1920, 1080), Work: (0, 0) - (1920, 1030)
Screen DPI: 120 (125%), twx: 12, stretch: 1

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