Dir Sync: Fold dirs; Recursive select; Hide items; Open file

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Guillaume
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Dir Sync: Fold dirs; Recursive select; Hide items; Open file

Post by *Guillaume »

When using Total Commander, I find myself using the Directory Synchronization pretty much every couple of minutes. Over the years I've found that these improvements would amount to huge steps forward in usability. Some were hinted to in other topics (e.g. http://ghisler.ch/board/viewtopic.php?t=28098) but not concretely proposed.
  1. The ability to fold/unfold a directory (and all of its subdirectories) in order to get a handle on the length of the list, with a [+] and [-] button on the left, plus perhaps a color change to improve "contrast/visibility" of when a directory is actually folded.
  2. Context items when right-clicking a directory seem inconsistent: when clicking [Remove selection], it's recursive: all subfolders and their files are affected. In contrast, all other operations only have an effect on the files directly below the directory selected. I propose all operations to have effect on the files directly below only, while SHIFT+right-clicking, or SHIFT+keyboard shortcut would apply the operation recursively.
  3. There are pretty much always files that one wants to disregard (for the moment) when synchronizing directories, without knowing this in advance, and which thus would best be hidden from the list before doing the sync operation. Therefore I would propose a context menu item allowing to discard a selection of files AND folders, actually hiding them from the list until next compare. I'm not talking about presets or filters, but impromptu selections of files and folders. This is all to prevent errors caused by the files list becoming too long.
  4. I really miss an option in the context menu to open a file, from either the left or right side, with the associated program (in Windows, or perhaps even considering TC internal associations).
  5. Similarly, just like viewing the left/right file with F3 or SHIFT+F3 respectively, an option to edit a file with F4 or SHIFT+F4 would be great.
  6. Being able to open the editor associated to F4 from within Lister (with F4) would also help with this.
  7. I realize that the following may have all kinds of technical challenges, but I'd like to mention anyway that the possibility to compare FTP locations with archive contents would really be a great improvement imho.
Last edited by Guillaume on 2016-06-10, 23:31 UTC, edited 1 time in total.
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Samuel
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Post by *Samuel »

Support++;
Especially for #1, #4 and #5
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Hacker
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Post by *Hacker »

Support++, too.

Roman
Mal angenommen, du drückst Strg+F, wählst die FTP-Verbindung (mit gespeichertem Passwort), klickst aber nicht auf Verbinden, sondern fällst tot um.
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Guillaume
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Post by *Guillaume »

Really would like to know what Christian thinks of these suggestions. So sorry for the bump, I'm just a bit afraid they'll end up lost underneath all the other topics.
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ghisler(Author)
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Post by *ghisler(Author) »

Nice ideas, would keep me busy for a few months. :)

Btw, 2 is not inconsistent: If you uncheck a directory from copying, then all its content cannot be copied either. But when you check a directory, it can be copied also without its content.
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Samuel
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Post by *Samuel »

ghisler(Author) wrote:Nice ideas, would keep me busy for a few months. :)
Go for it. :D

4 and 5 shouldn't be a big deal. They have been asked for several times in the past. Also an option to "open folder" of current selected file in TC would be great. (standalone sync - modal sync could show the folder in explorer?)
Folding would be really cool, but it could really be time consuming.
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Guillaume
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Post by *Guillaume »

ghisler(Author) wrote:Nice ideas, would keep me busy for a few months. :)
Yeah I'm not going easy on ya there, I know ;)
ghisler(Author) wrote:Btw, 2 is not inconsistent: If you uncheck a directory from copying, then all its content cannot be copied either. But when you check a directory, it can be copied also without its content.
Fair enough, that sounds right when the folder isn't present in the target folder yet. Nevertheless it would be a very significant improvement to allow for recursive operations in Directory Sync for e.g. the following case: Lots of files already present on right side need to be updated (e.g. with older versions, or when "ignore date" is checked), and below all those files are several nested subdirs that need the same updating. Currently you'd need to go through the entire list of hundreds of files, find where the last subdir is at and select the files manually before selecting the "copy (left to right)" task (a very annoying and not exactly mistake-proof manual task), or you need to right-click every single subdir and perform the task. With a recursive option, however, you could simply shift-rightclick folder & "recursive select for copying (left to right)". Done.
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Post by *eric@lesdinos.com »

If I may add also another suggestion:
- Add possibility to compare text file by text content instead of binary content. I frequently sync Linux folders with Windows ones with "By Content" option and Sync will flag files as different because of EOL encoding for instance but file comparison will show them as identical.
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Post by *ghisler(Author) »

You can use search plugins for this. There is already an internal search plugin for text comparison: When checking "by content", there is a button >> which you need to click to configure it.
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Post by *Bozzy »

I have a suggestion too on the same topic:
- now the compare files tool opens when double-clicking on a row with files on both sides; it would be useful to have the lister (or maybe the editor - this could be customizable) open when double-clicking on a row with a single file.
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Post by *Gerdd »

Can we expand the wish list here a bit more?

1) If there is no left file could F3 display the right file (instead of needing to do Shift-F3?)

2) in the midst of a giga-compare operation I sometimes find that a filename was changed along the way and I now have the same file on successive lines - with one name on the left and another on the right - a quick in place rename function (Shift-F6 or similar) would help me a lot.

3) Sometimes (actually quite often) this gets worse - I have reorganized my drive a good deal and files have been renamed or moved "wholesale." Asymmetric sync now wants to delete all the "old" files and copy the "new" ones into the new location. That is potentially a lot of data movement - but if TC could find the "missing" destination files amongst the ones to be discarded (by size or time stamp - if we also do contents we might as well copy the lot anyway ...) a few rename/move operations on the destination drive would be a lot faster and save a lot of activity on the drives.

4) on the other hand, sometimes I just want an overview, which directories have changed and which have stayed the same, without looking at endless lists of individual files. Today I just hit shift-alt-enter on both panels and then compare the numbers of bytes in the directories - I could see that being done by TC in a much more elegant way ...
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Post by *HolgerK »

Gerdd wrote:2) in the midst of a giga-compare operation I sometimes find that a filename was changed along the way and I now have the same file on successive lines - with one name on the left and another on the right - a quick in place rename function (Shift-F6 or similar) would help me a lot.
History.txt wrote:03.02.12 Release Total Commander 8.0 public beta 18 (32/64)
...
25.01.12 Added: Rename files directly in synchronize dirs (currently only in the file system), Hotkey: F6 and Shift+F6 (32/64)
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On place Rename

Post by *Gerdd »

WOW! That's what I call fast!
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Guillaume
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Post by *Guillaume »

Any chance of 4-6 being implemented in the next version?
And perhaps a Ctrl + Up/Down hotkey to quickly jump to the previous/next folder in the Sync Dirs screen.
4. I really miss an option in the context menu to open a file, from either the left or right side, with the associated program (in Windows, or perhaps even considering TC internal associations).
5. Similarly, just like viewing the left/right file with F3 or SHIFT+F3 respectively, an option to edit a file with F4 or SHIFT+F4 would be great.
6. Being able to open the editor associated to F4 from within Lister (with F4) would also help with this.
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Post by *Amitabha613 »

The ability to fold/unfold a directory (and all of its subdirectories) in order to get a handle on the length of the list, with a [+] and [-] button on the left, plus perhaps a color change to improve "contrast/visibility" of when a directory is actually folded.
Definitely. Plus 'expand all / collapse all dirs' controls would be great, too.

All the other topicstarter's suggestions are quite reasonalbe, too, especially #3 and #4.

May I also suggest the following:

a possibility to rename directories, just like it's now possible with files. Quite often dirs get renamed while their contents stay the same. Would be really handy to be able to rename them, instead of doing this from another instance of TC. Probably it won't be too difficult to implement, please consider it.

Also do you think it's a good idea, in addition to the current displaying options


files copy from left to right
equal files
unequal files
files copy from right to left


to also have an option to display files of same size and extension? Again, quite often files get renamed, while their contents are the same.
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