XYplorer Beta Club

I've been trying to remedy a problem of ending up with too many opened tabs because I routinely work with locations on many external USB drives. So I discovered the Lock Home Zone feature and with tab renaming, this helps a lot. But, an essential part of my daily work flow is going into folders found with Everything.exe, a separately running program. [ I use Everything.exe for all cross-volume searches because there is just nothing that comes close to its speed and relative simplicity.] So, the problem is that when I double-click on a folder in Everything.exe (or use the XYplorer menu item on the Windows shell context menu), the folder always opens in a new tab (or a currently focused non-locked tab), even though I have a matching locked (but not currently in focus) home zone tab present, with its home otherwise set as an indirect parent of the target folder. I also now realize that this is the behavior within XYplorer itself -- ie. when you are not currently focused in a locked home zone tab but navigate to some folder under the home path from the tree pane, it will again, go to the folder in a new tab or the currently focused non-locked tab but not the matching locked home zone tab.

Is there any way to have XYplorer always go to folders in a matching locked home zone tab, if it exists, whether the navigation is done from within XYplorer or from without? I realize this can get tricky if you have more than 1 matching home zone tab. In that case, I suppose you could just go to the one rooted with closest home or current path, a choice that should be configurable. [ My usage is to have only 1 locked home zone tab for each drive, so this situation wouldn't occur; if I used another locked tab for a location under an existing home path it would be normally be a fully locked tab without a home.]

There is a tweak that might help (I have no time to test it):

admin wrote:There is a tweak that might help (I have no time to test it):

Code: Select all

    + Tweak for better reuse of existing tabs. Set to 1 to autoselect 
      the first tab with a matching locked homezone when the current tab 
      is locked. Tabs are scanned from left to right, first in pane 1, 
      then in pane 2.
        TabBinding=1
      Note that the feature is not applied when you force opening the 
      location in a new tab (e.g. by holding SHIFT).

This is great, Don. Works fine so far. And doing the matching with a left-right scan is a good approach because it lets you control the match order yourself with the tab order.

The tweak has been working fine, and at this point, I would be very content if that's all you did on this issue. BUT - I would be even more content and grateful if you could provide one little additional tweak on the tweak (I know, that sounds dreadful).

It's this -- for my purposes, I always want the locked home zone tab to take precedence, even over the current in-focus non-locked tab. That's because I always want the tab-specific history in each locked home zone tab to be complete for any of its home paths I navigate to. There's usually at least one non-locked tab around that occasionally gets focus and it seems to be catching my dedicated home paths too often.

I think this is a reasonable and cogent part of this overall feature and hope you can consider this additional modification.

Not at the moment, I'm afraid. That would be a large rewrite.

admin wrote:Not at the moment, I'm afraid. That would be a large rewrite.

Really? I was hoping you would have just needed to implement another value for TabBinding or something like that. Ok, well as I said, TabBinding=1 has taken me most of the way further to where I wanted to be, so I am very thankful for that.