I'm so confused. Google Drive File Stream allows me to do all of that, directly in DOpus, as pictured below. Am I misunderstanding?
Jon you seem to know about the plugin API, why you don't do it? 
I've to use Filezilla Pro and the file manager now.
Seriously, I would pay extra for cloud storage add-on. For DO Pro Plus.
Cloud storage is to big to ignore...
I'm going to bump this thread back up, since I truly feel that this is one significant feature that Opus is missing. Being able to directly browse and interact with our cloud storage folders without having to install their various connector apps would be enormously helpful. There are a couple of file managers out there that offer the kind of cloud connectivity being requested here, and I don't understand why Opus, the most powerful file manager the world has seen, does not.
Jon, could you reconsider this, at least for Opus 13, or X3, or whatever you want to call it?
I think it was explained above aptly by Leo. Leo also recently said that Onedrive broke Opus integration again.
Going forward though I am sure it will get there as cloud systems figure and standardise their APIs. Personally I would very much like the few devs on board not to be too spread thin.
(The usual case -- local management of synced folders and showing sync status etc. -- is already taken care of by installing the cloud software and using Opus normally. Windows has an API for how that works and Opus supports it. The rest of this post is only about using Opus to manage files on a remote, proprietary "cloud storage" server without the files being local or any of the software from the cloud vendor being installed.)
For direct, remote management of folders on cloud storage folders, when the cloud software isn't installed at all, a standard protocol like FTPS or SFTP (or even SMB) makes most sense to me. Do the cloud storage providers not support that? If not, maybe you should ask them. I feel like you're tackling this problem at the wrong end of the pipe. The standards and protocols for doing this already exist, and Opus already supports them.
Supporting a different proprietary, non-standard protocol for each of 25+ different cloud vendors would take a lot of time away from work that benefits more people. (Even someone who wants this probably only wants 1 or 2 of the many protocols.)
It's not just the development time but the ongoing maintenance, testing, and support. Especially given our experience with that kind of web-service vendor changing, breaking, replacing or removing APIs with no incentive to consider or warn third party clients. Or closing down their services after a couple of years, making the work a questionable use of time. Or deciding they don't like third party clients anymore. And so on. Too many things outside our control.
A VFS plugin could talk to cloud storage directly, if someone was to write one. We're more than happy to help anyone who disagrees with our assessment/priorities and wants to invest their own time coding and supporting it themselves (or invest their own money paying someone to do that work).
We can provide support and knowledge about writing Opus VFS plugins and anything else specific to Opus, and we can make changes to the VFS API if they are required to make things run smoother. But we don't believe it makes sense for us to write and maintain this ourselves, at least not at the moment. Maybe when there are fewer cloud vendors (but the number seems to be increasing), or if they can agree on a standard protocol such that the numbers make sense (but if they cared about standard protocols, they'd already be supporting one of the existing ones.) Or if we run out of other things to do, but we have so much in development already, and a lot more in the ideas list after that, that that I don't think we'll do this any time soon.
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Well, you are arguing the business case for this, as you should, and I am certainly not in a position nor would it be appropriate for me to engage on that side of the argument. However, here are the items that I think should be considered:
- Yes, there are many cloud storage providers out there, but in practice, the overwhelming majority of users will be found using at least one of the following: OneDrive, Google Drive, and DropBox. Well, perhaps add Box to the list, too. Thus I would argue that it is in fact only these three or four that need to be supported, and those 25+ you listed above is not really a number that's relevant.
- Once we have narrowed down our target to the providers above, I am confident that you will find that there are very substantial numbers of the types of users that are interested in a sophisticated file management solution such as Directory Opus that are interested and that will indeed benefit. I am almost willing to bet that there's a lot more users benefiting from this feature than there are, say, users that have much interest in the powerful scripting capabilities offered by DOpus.
I will say that I do understand the developer's concern about cloud storage providers changing their APIs on a whim, and I understand the hard feelings associated with that.
On the other hand, a number of much smaller (I think) software vendors (see Commander One for MacOS for an example) are offering these capabilities for products of much more limited scope. With that the case, one would at least argue that it is not clear that there is no business case for this feature. Heck, I and probably others would happily pay extra for such a feature.