I've spend hours looking for the command to invoke the Standalone Viewer (which is referenced in Help and Dopus promotional material) before stumbling upon the SHOW command. And the SHOW command is described as the Opus Image Viewer. If they are, as I understand, the same, documentation should be standardized.
More importantly, why are they not invoked by similar commands with a switch to indicate "open window" or "open panel"? I'm guessing these are legacy code issues, but from a usability point of view, they are just different manifestations of the same function.
You're correct, the name of the Show command is historical - it derives from the original Amiga version of the software.
The standalone image viewer is different from the Lister view pane however - the Show command, as a fully fledged file command, operates on selected files in the Lister. For example, select 5 image files out of 20 and click the Show button on the toolbar (it is there by default, by the way), and only those 5 files will be displayed in the image viewer. In contrast, the view pane is just another element in the Lister, like dual file display and the tree.
Probably with hindsight the Show command should have been called View though
Makes sense. But please do standardize the references in the documentation to either Standalone Viewer or Opus Image Viewer, or better still, Opus Viewer, since it does so much more than images.