File Location column <-> Viewer Pane toggle

Hello, File location is a column typically located at the rightmost place of the file information columns:
e.g.:
Filename // Size // Modified // ... // LOCATION

At the same time "location" is a column that by its nature take up a lot of space.
Thus "location" and "viewer pane" are "natural competitors" for the same space.

Typical situations where "location" is usually needed are:

  • Find results
  • Flat mode

So ideally, the following situations would exclusively occur:

  1. Find results:
    1.1 With Viewer, No locations column
    1.2 No Viewer, with locations column

  2. Flat View(s):
    2.1 see 1.1
    2.2 see 1.2

  3. Locations that are NOT Find results and that are NOT viewed as Flat View:
    3.1 With Viewer, no locations column
    3.2 No Viewer, no locations column

A question that is somewhat related is here I think:

Or put differently, "locations" should not show up when Viewer pane is active because it will cause a horizonal scrolling bar that is never needed.

And in locations other than find results/flat view, "locations" being active when Viewer Pane is not active looks redundant. Though if it makes things easier, having locations still show in that situation would not hurt, having that fixed would just be cosmetic.

I am not sure what will haven when one moves through various folders/locations though, with Viewer Pane active.

I don't even know if it can be accomplished, to have Viewer Pane "disable" the locations colum "globally" when it's active, and enable "globally" when it's inactive?

EDIT: perhaps it would work by defining a folder format for "find results" that is always with "locations" (not that important to have the horizonal scroll bar perfect there), and for all locations that are not "find results", have "locations" disabled for their folder format, but show it temporarily for indiviual folders when FLAT VIEW is active (and again, not that important to have the scroll bar perfect in case of FLAT View)

If you want to avoid horizontal scrollbars, you can set columns to Collapse mode which will make them collapse down to nothing if there isn't room for them, while taking up excess space when there is room to spare.

1 Like

Thank you, Leo.

This solves most of it!

I have defined a pixel number for all columns except the last one (locations).

a) Is it intentional that if I set locations to "collapse", the remainder of the path will be some random string from the path (perhaps centered?) instead of the beginning, such as "C:"?

b) Is it intentional that if I set it to "Fill" for "locations", Viewer Pane will cause a horizontal scroll bar to appear in the above-described scenario? I would have thought it would just fill the remaining space up to the border of the Viewer? ("Fill" would allow things to allways look the same, i.e. the length of the selection highlighting would not constantly differ from folder to folder depending on the individual location lengths)

There's nothing random about it. It's standard middle truncation for path strings so you can see the drive letter (or server name etc.) at the start and also the final folder name at the end. If there isn't enough space for both then they will of course also start being truncated.

Yes, but you can also make it not do that. Read the manual for details or watch the video about the different modes which is linked at the bottom of the main folder formats FAQ as well as the tutorials sub-forum.