It's time to release TC 9.0?

[korg250]

I think that most users use just the basic functions and are pretty much happy, because they work. You would have to come up with something revolutionary to get them excited and that's hard to do, you can't sit and invent something fantastic, just like that. But there are tons of things that can be improved or optimized. No "wow effect" from that, but personally, that's exactly what I want, making things better, without following some stupid fads and making "changes for changes". Too bad it's not the "in" thing nowadays.

If I could suggest something for TC, then off top of my head (random order):

1) Truly asynchronous panels. E.g. when I need to wait a minute to open remote directory with several thousands of files over slow VPN, I want to be able to do something else in the other panel or start a program from button bar in the meantime. Instead of just staring at "locked" TC and waiting. I realize that this is probably big one, implementation wise, but it would be really cool.

2) Allow plugins to use "<number> drive" feature, just like internal FTP. You know, when you connect to FTP server and you have it accesible as drive "0". And second one as drive "1". Unlike with e.g. SFTP where you connect and must take care to not reuse the panel for anything else, otherwise you have to take another trip through network neighborhood, when you need it again.
This one annoys me for years, more and more in fact, with increased SFTP use. In just two weeks, I'll have 10 years anniversary with this one. I don't care much about centralized "bookmarks" any more (but I wouldn't say no to that), just the "<number> drive".

3) Support for stuff like links. I know it's not for most users, but advanced file manager should be able to create a stupid symlink without external tools.

4) Various optimizations. E.g. when comparing files by content, file A can be read from disk in 4 seconds, file B takes the same. But comparing them takes 30 seconds (non-SSD drive, depends heavily on file's position on disk). I'm sure there's possible to do something about that.

5) User interface. Now don't get me wrong, I myself am die hard fan of classic Win9x interface and already decided to be a founding member of "Windows 7 (with Classic theme) forever" club. But the fact is, TC was born in days of 640x480 and it did not change much since then.
Is crowded ~550x450 settings dialog really an advantage? Or various other dialogs with fixed size, e.g. the packer one, where file/path field is only ~350px? It was fine in 8.3 file names days, but now it's not that great any more. Or that stuffing of checkboxes in the same dialog, why? Copy dialog got a width update recently, but it's still fixed. What if someone likes really long names?
These are of course details and TC will work great even if they never get touched. But it would be nice improvement if they did.

As a long time user of TC, I think your suggestions are great ideas for a new version - I would even pay for them (specially number 1 and 5).

[JohnFredC]

IMO any future development of Total Commander should track very closely to the evolving user computing experience.

To my surprise I find myself frequently using my Windows desktop from my Android tablet via a TeamViewer remote terminal session. This works well, especially in the touch mode offered by TeamViewer. The Windows 8.x touch paradigm proves to be quite smooth in this environment... it is almost as if I am using a dedicated Windows tablet instead of my Samsung Note + remote connection to my desktop (sometimes 1000 miles away).

The advent of inexpensive Windows 8 tablets (<$99, recently!) and their resulting popularity suggests that many users will find the new touch interface in Windows 8 useful on those devices.

After my experience with these remote Windows "touch" sessions and as prices fall for Windows tablets, a Windows 8.x or 10-based tablet becomes increasingly appealing to me, even to the extent of eventually abandoning my Note for one. Naturally I would wish to continue my use of TC and its functionality on that Windows tablet.

Unfortunately, and because of the UI design, TC 8.x for Windows is uncomfortable to use in a touch-centered mode. OTOH, TC for Android and TC for Windows phone work quite well for touch (though I wish for several improvements). Perhaps future versions of TC for Windows could be developed with an ability to perform efficiently on touch devices such as Windows tablets.

A good place to start would be an UI that combined the best from TC on Android and Windows Phone, xPlore on Android, and fX on Android (astonishingly good touch design), plus some pieces from the "Metro" approach promoted by Microsoft for Windows, with the goal being to support all legacy functionality available in current versions of desktop TC, but in a touch experience.

Please do not replace the current UI (I will be keeping my desktop, mouse, and keyboard 'til I die), but rather implement future versions of TC for Windows as an "universal" app, suitable to run on any Windows device, and offering (either automatically, or via user selection) the most appropriate UI metaphor for each such device.

Thanks for listening!

[hi5]

Well, I'd suggest creating a webpage where users could suggest features and vote on them so you would see which suggestion is most popular. I am sure there is some free software to create such a page.

I would be very much in favour of this, it avoids repetition and gives an indication to users as to what to expect in a future version. Not informing users is harmful, no feature is so secret or novel other programs don't have it or have something similar.

[ZoSTeR]

Maybe we should even talk about features and options to get rid of.
E.g. did anyone ever use the "Tree" option in the copy/move dialog?

[Sob]

Removing stuff is problematic, there's always someone who likes it. I would agree about the tree, I did not use it even once and I've been using TC every day for past many years. But I'm sure there's someone who it would make unhappy.

About the feature voting idea, most if not all of those I've seen for other software were, lets say unconvincing. You have software used by millions and then there's feature voting where top picks have like hundered or two votes. Does it really say anything about what people want most? Absolute numbers aside, you don't know what those votes mean. Did those people really think it through? Or did they just discover the page and thought "cool, voting page, lets see, I want this, this and that, ..." all in ten minutes or less? I don't see an advantage over current suggestions forum.

[ZoSTeR]

I could imagine a suggestion forum with an automatic voting/poll feature for every post. Let's say with scores from 0 to 5, i.e. "I don't care at all" to "Best since sliced bread". It could be even positioned at the end of the thread.

This would eliminate the need for the "+ support" spamming and keep the drive-by clickers at bay. Looking at the average view counts of the current suggestion threads I'd say you'd get a pretty good number of votes to evaluate a suggestions popularity.

[larry99]

What I am missing most is that most programs cannot directly use files provided by FS plugins (e.g. SFTP, WebDAV...).

Ideally there could be some sort of driver to map them to a drive letter or (even better) to a folder. Then every Windows program could just use the files (at least if started from TC).

But even a more simple copy-to-temp solution (similar to ALT-F3) could make life easier if the ideal solution is too difficult to implement.

[Lefteous]

2JohnFredC

touch

Could you give us some details what is so bad about TC's touch support?

Removing stuff is problematic

Well I think it depends on how it is implemented. TC is famous for having a lot of options. So why not remove legacy stuff by default but let the user who need this stuff reenable it using wincmd.ini settings?

[fenix_productions]

As we stay with "search"…

Because of AND OR limitations I often have to use descriptions as middle step for my searches.

Maybe it is the time to extend combined search to something like:
1 AND (2 OR 3) AND 4 AND 5 AND 6
(1 AND 2) OR (3 AND 4) OR (5 AND 6)

--- different suggestion --
Extend "New folder (F7)" function to have some features from extDir internally.

I know that I can type some magic like a\aa|a\ab|b|c and have nice structure built but it is not easy to read and I get lost with more siblings. Also if I try to separate some elements with space (to read such string), I have spaces in folders names…

[seb-]

now as there seem to be a lot of ideas in this thread...

2ghisler: do you plan to have some place where the community could order these ideas into a list of most wanted features that you could consider for future improvements of TC?

Also there seem to be a lot of questions in the forum rearding features that have been asked for a couple of times. A list of features that were asked for with maybe one line of reason why it is not going to be implemented (soon) would be nice... Altough i dont think it is more important than having a place to discuss new features

[ghisler(Author)]

I think that the Wiki would be a good place, since every forum user can login to the Wiki with the same user name and password.

[Lefteous]

There has been a suggestion page on the wiki since its beginning:
http://ghisler.ch/wiki/index.php/Ideas_and_suggestions

But how does it help to get a list of most wanted improvements? As everyone could edit, everyone could change the order.

[fenix_productions]

I think that the Wiki would be a good place, since every forum user can login to the Wiki with the same user name and password.

Not if you have underline in your name (as I have mentioned few years ago) and login without is forbidden*.

*) I had fenixproductions once but lost email and forgot password. I used fenix_productions as new name for new account. None of them worked on wiki last time I had checked.

[nsp]

I think that the Wiki would be a good place, since every forum user can login to the Wiki with the same user name and password.

@ghisler(Author)
Can you just make a list of what you could/want to implement gathering this thread and TC suggestions (English) forum.
If you want to consider any vote just make some polls like First choice, Second choice, Third choice .... for TC 9.0 evolution.

Will you follow user votes

[ghisler(Author)]

Well, I'm trying to extract info from this thread, but it's hard because it's already 9 pages long, and many ideas are not interesting for a wider audience. So a different format is definitely needed...