Total Commander

I’ve put together a mockup of a “better” “Select Drives” dialog.

• I’ve added mnemonics for activating the list and the “Local Drives” button
  I’ve capitalized the words of the dialog and the “Local Drives” button, making, in my mind, them easier to read – especially for the button
  I’ve made the buttons slightly smaller to better fit with the “standard size” of buttons with the contents they contain
  I’ve moved all buttons to the bottom of the dialog, which may be debatable, as it makes the dialog slightly taller and the list “unnecessarily” wide. Having the buttons there fits better with how most other dialogs place their buttons, which I think makes it easier to use. This is also related to a proposed addition discussed below.
  I’ve visually separated the “Local Drives” button from the “OK” and “Cancel” buttons to make it easier to see that it has some, to those two buttons, unrelated function
  I’ve added the appropriate amount of padding between the different elements (5 pixels)

Also, it would be great if the listbox worked more like the panel listboxes, that is, selection was toggled. This may be a lot of work, however.

Also, what’s the reasoning behind having the drive letters displayed as “[-X-]” instead of simply “X”?

Also, it would be nice if the drive labels were displayed in the list, if that option is enabled.

now wrote: I’ve capitalized the words of the dialog and the “Local Drives” button, making, in my mind, them easier to read – especially for the button.

Why should it be easy to read capitalized captions? I understand that MS is doing this but each book (or article) uses capitalisation for beginning of sentences only. There are few exceptions for using big letters like special names but they are exceptions. Please correct me but I've seen strange big letters usage only in German language writings (starting nouns with capitals).

My own proposal:
maybe adding drives captions on the right side of letters on screenshot's ListBox could be a good idea?

fenix_productions wrote: I’ve capitalized the words of the dialog and the “Local Drives” button, making, in my mind, them easier to read – especially for the button.
Why should it be easy to read capitalized captions? I understand that MS is doing this but each book (or article) uses capitalisation for beginning of sentences only. There are few exceptions for using big letters like special names but they are exceptions. Please correct me but I've seen strange big letters usage only in German language writings (starting nouns with capitals).

Because “Local Drives” is not a sentence, it’s a label, a caption, a title. And, since MS does it, perhaps an application running on their operating system should too?

fenix_productions wrote:My own proposal:
maybe adding drives captions on the right side of letters on screenshot's ListBox could be a good idea?

Wasn’t that one of my proposals?

now wrote:Also, it would be nice if the drive labels were displayed in the list, if that option is enabled.

2now
I've missed your captions proposal. Sorry.

Select drives dialog is very very bad thing.

This out-of-date heritage of the Norton Commander.

It only stirs to work with the program at a choice of a disk.

It is the superfluous duplicate of a standard way of a choice of a disk.

I always choose disks the mouse. After occurrence of this superfluous window it is necessary to displace focus of attention to this window, to press "Cancel" and again to choose a disk the mouse.

Some [russian] users have got rid it of this dialog by means of KillOK, SM2BT or by means of similar programs.

I don’t quite understand what you mean. What’s the standard way of choosing drives to, for example, search? No one is forced to use this dialog, by the way, it simply allows you to limit/extend the search to a set of drives.

I guess one solution is to list the drives in the “Search in” combobox, like explorer does. This will, however, not allow you to choose a set of drives (beyond “local drives”).