Abbreviate path in location column

Help & Support
1

Hello,

at the moment, the location column will show e.g.

C:\Users\ihaveareallyreallylongname\Documents\(the interesting part of the path)\

On mobile computers with a small screen, this will, in conjunction with the location column inherently being one that is shown in addition to many other columns, lead to horizontal space issues.

Opus will now abbreviate the path by substituting three dots for the part of the path that is immediately before the lastmost folder. However, these subfolders are often relevant information. The userfolder however is well-known and not useful information.

I also remember that my username was created by Windows upon installation, using my first and last name, and then I had to stick with that. I was not asked to create the username myself as far as I can remember. I guess there would have been a way to avoid this during installation, or immediately after, but now I am stuck with a long username, and there are many reports that changing the username results in a lot of trouble with apps not recognizing the path etc. It is probably possible to eventually fix all issues, but in my experience there will be one or two programs that will cause a headache / waste a lot of time fixing.

My suggestion would be that the user could specify a substitute, with

C:\Users\ihaveareallyreallylongname\Documents

becoming

\Documents

Sorting could still behave as if the full path were displayed.

I think lots of users would profit from this. In fact it does not just affect small screens. If one does not use insanely small font like I do (to the point that it hurts my eyes and back), I can imagine many users with larger screens who use "normal/reasonably" sized fonts / normal Windows zoom settings having similar problems.

The problem became much more relevant for me since I have started using the "core" magic of DOpus, which is Flat View. I find myself needing the folder path column quite often now.

Related:
I actually configured the popup-menu that shows up when hovering over a file to show the full path just because it is so often that the location column does not suffice to show me the path, and it is very annoying.

It's also the reason why I was asking for the option to toggle the tree view instead of closing it (which loses the state). If you do implement a button at the top of the tree view to toggle tree view, it would by the way be cool if that command were also available when creating buttons, such that one could make a button that will toggle between "tree view minimized, tabs horizontal" and "tree view visible, tabs vertical" which would be super handy in situations where one has a list of files (such as find results, flat view) that have very long paths. But this is just a side note.

Additional comment:
In the address bar, DOpus does substitute a part of the path, but still keeps the username. This is not such a big problem because the address bar is very long and has lots of space for a mega-long path, in fact it would not hurt if the full path were shown there.
I am mentioning this because this kind of abbreviation, which still includes the username, is not suitable for the columns column if DOpus developers were to implement abbreviated paths there. I believe the username (current user) should be completely ommited, starting the path with "Desktop" or "Documents". (Personally, I would actually prefer C:\...\Documents because I like to see the drive, but that is probably not what most would want).

1 Like
2

One might get things fixed by triggering/toggling "Location (relative)" with FlatView...
Cool, now I'm my own support staff :smiley:

3

Assigning "relative Path" in settings -> folder format to the format for Flat View fixed the problem for the most part - it was an obvious solution but I didn't think of it first. I hope my posting still has some value.... or perhaps points to a solution that others didn't think of either.
In fact, I think the default preset in DOpus settings for FlatView used to be "relative path", I must have stupidly changed it to absolute.
The problem remains for Find Results, of course, but I can live with that, especially since the DOpus team did like my suggestion about Folder Tree toggling.

4

There’s a Collection folder format for that (and you can also save path formats for specific named collections, if needed).

(It looks like it's smart and will still show full paths if you do a search on more than one folder at once, too.)

1 Like
5

You mean the relative folder path column is smart and will act like a full path column in case one selected several folders, that's interesting. (It would mean thought that the suggestion with abbreviated user folder path would be particularly helpful there).
Unlike with Flat View, I don't feel so comfortable enabling "relative location" for find results... because with Flat View, the location is much defined by the folder that is active, whereas Find Results folders don't immediately show where the files are located beyond the relative path.
As a consolation price, one could enable both "location" and "location (relative)", for Find results, and limit "location" to a few pixels in order to at least get an idea about the drive the file(s) are on which I find particularly improtant.
In any case, since there already exists a scheme that will abbreviate a path by substituting "...", it might indeed be possible to make my suggestion work like this:
"if path is longer than there is space, first shorten user folder path IF it exists, with "...", and if there still is not enough space, also substitute parts of the path after "username" (like it is already happening).

As always, thanks for the comments that you have made.