Fonts & Icons Revisted, System vs Internal

[mistaknly]

I think I've read every post about fonts and icons especially those concerning how the file pane looks as compared to brand x(s)'s (et al).

ICONS:

Way back in the dark ages, I wasn't a fan of Norton Commander. I preferred a product called xtree and the follow on xtree gold. So I was never enamored of the built-in icons from NC that carried over to WC and TC.

So currently (if I'm correct) there is no "switch" to turn on system icons as opposed to the built-in icons (the required ones). This makes the program much faster (especially with older hardware).

However, if you have lots of programs like WinRAR, WinACE, WinZIP, UltraISO, WinIMAGE, ISOrecorder, Nero and the like, you've probably spent a lot of time configuring file associations to get the system to show you the icons you want and for the programs to work correctly.

Now I understand that TC handles archives internally as a group, but even if you configure TC to use external archive programs, it still uses the built-in archive symbol for all archives and those old ugly folder icons.

In addition, there have been lots of posts about other programs (Corel, ie) that creat icons on the fly from internal information. I've seen the solutions for those issues in the forum on a case by case basis and read the wikis and Clo's help file etc. etc.

So as far as icons go, and to avoid a lot of those problems, I vote for TC version 8 to have a switch to use system icons (you could even have a caveat that this is slooow). It is even slow when you load a brand x window with lots of shorcuts and files with their own special associated icons, even though one of the brand x's is built into the operating system itself. So be it. It's slower.

FONTS:

I spent a day trying lots of fonts and downloading even more to try to get the font and the line spacing to be more readable. After reading some more posts and more experimenting I discoverd that to duplicate the spacing and readabliity of brand x, you need to use Tahoma 8 regular, AND set the icon size to 17x17. Otherwise the lines are squished together enough so that us old farts have trouble reading it.

This begs the question, why don't the built-in icons have the same line spacing in TC as they does is other appications. The built-in icons are not 17x17 but they act like it. If you pick a font to use that you like, one of the attributes of that font is the interline spacing.

I realize you must increase the spacing when you increase the icon size. But why reduce the spacing when you select 16x16 or even smaller. I've tried smaller settings and it just squishing everything even more. It might? make sense to make the minimum line spacing that which comes with the font.

So maybe that switch mentioned above could be to just use system settings overall. But I'd rather have font control locally as we do now. I just hate the icons, but don't want to spend a lot of time with a resource editor. Anyway, even if I changed the icons, you still (currently) wouldn't be able to get discreet icons for different types of acrchive files.

And I don't think you (CG) want to sit around and put 80 icons into the resource area of TC. There's already 20. Supporting internal icons for all the different types would be a job in itself and probably not the best use your time. (So that's an idea. A seperate icon library (like for the command bars) that users could add new program icons to, so that you don't have to go to the shell to get them everytime). (Still, you'd have to allow pointers to discreet archive types which would be a fundamental change as opposed to how it now works.)

But if there is some overriding delphi reason, or internal system architecture reason that you want or have to continue the internal (or seperate external file) structure, I would be happy to use some tools and extract a lot of the icons for iso, rar, ace, par, etc. But you'd have to allow seperate pointers for all the archive types to get the different icons.


End of rant.

Rest assured, any bitching noted above pertains to how much I LIKE the program. If I didn't, I wouldn't bother with this, or even the program. I love the ability to customize and add plugins for just about anything. I can even change all the commands and shortcuts to xtree format instead of NC format! (I'm not doing that anymore..) And you (CG) did call for suggestions for a "new" look to update the Windows 3.0 appearence.

Thanks for all your hard work, and thanks to all the people who support TC on the forums and writing plugins, tutorials, help files, etc, etc..

I hope this contributes something.

[SanskritFritz]

About packer icons:
You can experiment with the
[PackerPlugins]
section in wincmd.ini.
There you see a number in front of the definition:

Code: Select all

avi=277,C:\Program Files\Total Commander\AviWcx.wcx
icl=15,C:\Program Files\Total Commander\ICLRead.wcx

You can use these numbers to modify the behaviour of the packer plugin:

;1=can create new archives
;2=can modify exisiting archives
;4=Archive can contain multiple files
;8=can delete files
;16=supports the options dialogbox
;32=sSupports packing in memory
;64=detect archive type by content
;128=allow searching for text in archives
;256=show as normal files (hide packer icon), open with Ctrl+PgDn, not Enter

Adding the 256 to the number does the trick.

[mistaknly]

Thanks for the reply.

In my packer plugins section I have:

lst=23,C:\Program Files\MISC_TOOLS\totalcmd\plugins\wcx\CatalogMaker\CatalogMaker.wcx
iso=192,%COMMANDER_PATH%\plugins\iso_wincmd_1.7.3b3\iso.wcx

So I can see where if I change iso to 256 that would give me an iso icon. And indeed, following your instructions, it did successfully change the iso icon to the system icon.

But what do I do about rar, zip, ace, 7z etc, etc,? They aren't in the packer plugin section. And I don't see any numbers prepended to the lines in the regular configuration section where zip, rar etc are located to modify.


Thanks again.

[petermad]

2mistaknly
You should rather change it to 448 (192+256) Otherwise you loose your other settings/capabilities of your plugin.

But what do I do about rar, zip, ace, 7z etc,

7z ought to be in your plugin list - TC doesn't support /z internally.

[Palii]

So...is there a way to unlock default windows icons for internally supported compressed files?

[petermad]

So...is there a way to unlock default windows icons for internally supported compressed files?

Not AFAIK