"background" file operations not really in the background

When I'm doing really large move or copy operations that take more than a few seconds, I'm quite vexed by the little boxes that pop up showing the progress of the operation. I understand that these things are happening in the background in some sense and I can do lots of them in parallel, which is great and DOpus is powerful blah blah blah, but in practice they dramatically interfere with my use of DOpus because when I'm Alt+Tab-ing my way around different programs and going back and forth to DOpus these little boxes wind up getting the focus instead of the Lister I'm trying to use.

It seems like it would be the simplest thing to click something and get these boxes out of the way, but I can't find any such option. When I click the minimize button for those boxes, they do go away from view but it's not a real solution because they're still in the chain of Alt-Tab focus switching, so unless I expend the extra time and attention to look at the Alt-Tab "menu" before switching, I wind up often unintentionally putting these boxes back in focus, which then requires more clicks to re-minimize them. Furthermore, if I have, say, five copy/move operations running at once, then that's five extra Tab keystrokes just to switch to and fro a Lister.

So no matter what I do, there is a huge loss in efficiency for my use of DOpus while I'm doing these basic daily file operations.

Worse, on several occasions I accidentally aborted a huge copy/move operation because I was flying around on the keyboard (which is the whole point of having DOpus in the first place!) and the little box got focus when I thought the Lister had focus. When an operation takes a half-hour and I have to restart it, that's a huge loss of efficiency.

I think when I tested Total Commander before DOpus there was a simple way to truly put those boxes in the background.

Is there a solution to this problem?

Thanks,
Mike

There's no way to hide the progress dialogs at the moment but it seems like a reasonable idea for a new feature. I will send GPSoft a suggestion for you.

You might be able to use one of the 3rd party programs that lets you minimize any window to a system tray icon in the mean time.

I'd also very much like to see a nice solution for this. My suggestion would be to add a special "Minimize to status bar" button to the copy / move dialog. The status bar would have a reserved area that displays a combined progress bar for all copy / move operations currently running. A small arrow (similar to a combo box) in the status bar, next to the combined progress bar, would then allow to fold up a detailed view with a progress bar for each running operation, along with "cancel" and "Maximize to dialog" icons next to each detailed progress bar. Something like this.

You mean like some Firefox download managers? Sounds reasonable to me (for what my personal opinion is worth. :slight_smile:)

Right, I also believe to have seen this implemented in some download manager, but unfortunately I cannot recall which one it was.