When I am organising my Mp3s, I often have two lister panes open as shown in the screenshot. My workflow is such that I move the folders of Mp3s I've just tagged (by cutting) in the left lister to the right lister (paste into).
This is OK, but when after I finished pasting, I sometimes make the mistake of trying to navigate the folder tree while the right lister pane is still active, when i should have clicked in the left lister pane first in order to activate that first. thus, the source and destination folders (both panes) become the same and i have to rectify the problem by clicking back in the right pane, which is a pain.
In order to avoid this misadventure,is it possible to set opus up[ so that if you cntrl-click a folder (opens the right pane), the text is a different color (in this case not green. e.g. yellow). furthermore, would it be possible to get the color of the folder tree to match the color of the active pane? this way, you could visually ascertain which pane was active?
However, you can open separate folder trees for each side, or a single folder tree that only affects one side or the other, if that would solve the problem.
I'm basically with Leo... but maybe some ideas of use:
1.) You could change the way you're (a) opening the destination / right lister pane, and (b) copying or moving the files over to the destination folder so that you never "activate" it at all... the default toolbar has a "move files" button that would do that for you instead of using Cut/Copy/Paste requiring you to click into and activate your destination folder.
2.) Since you're concerned about having to scroll horizontally to see the whole file/folder name, have you considered opening dual-pane listers in horizontal mode rather than your current vertical mode?
3.) The file display border of the "active" lister pane / or rather "Source border" / in a dual-pane lister is always "green" while the "Destination border" is "orange"... you can change those colors for some other visual cue if the default color schemes don't pop out enough for you...?
4.) You could submit an enhancement request for some other effect to help you distinguish source from destination display , ideas that spring to mind:
a.) perhaps an option to cause the currently active "source" or "destination" file display border to blink or something...
b.) perhaps a set of similar options for related commands to control whether or not a dual-pane file display affects the position of the folder tree at all - something along the lines of: Set DUAL=Toggle,Horiz,notreeupdate and Go OPENINDUAL=horiz,notreeupdate... so that clicking into that second file display doesn't affect the folder tree at all unless you close the "other" file display... making the secondary / "new" file display the "only" file display currently opened... I might use such a thing myself.
The last point sounds like what you can do already, in terms of opening a tree which is only tied to the left or right file display. (The other options being a single shared tree, two trees (one for each side), or no trees at all.)
In order to execute the last suggestion, is there a global setting into which the commands Set DUAL=Toggle,Horiz,notreeupdate and Go OPENINDUAL=horiz,notreeupdate can be entered?
The "notreeupdate" stuff doesn't exist (steje made it up as an idea), and I don't think is needed anyway.
Do you always have the second file display open, or do you have it closed until you need it and then open it on demand? How to solve this will differ depending on that.
Well, there's the Share single Tree between dual file displays option that Leo might be thinking about. Forgot about that ('doh)... and it's a "global" change to how all of your dual-pane listers would function as opposed to a more transient on-demand mode I was thinking of with the fictitious options I spewed above in 4.b.
I had that option checked. Unchecking it seems to work pretty good. cheers guys! Regarding my original idea about changing the color of folders in the directory color of files in the tree, would there be any way to do this by using the set directory color command somehow? just curious...
Leo's first reply was no... you can modify the colors of the folder tree text and background, but you can't set different colors in the file display dependent on source/destination active/inactive. You'd need to submit a feature request / program suggestion through GPSoftware's Support form.
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I think I will try option 4b, as that sounds like it will be pretty effective.