Folder Tree scrolling is too fast with touchpad

Help & Support
1

I'm currently evaluating Directory Opus, and it's generally excellent, but there's one issue that makes it hard for me to use.

I find that the vertical scrolling in the folder tree is far too fast when using 2 finger scrolling on the touchpad. However in the file display the scroll speed is fine. So the scrolling speeds are very different in the file display and folder tree. This makes it very difficult to use switching between the two.

It looks like a very small movement on the touchpad causes the folder tree to scroll one line, so a more significant movement causes a large scroll that's hard to follow. On the file display a similar movement on the touchpad causes a much smaller movement (far less than a single line), and so the overall movement is much better.

In other programs (and in the file display), the scrolling is slower and usable.

I've looked through the settings and can't find anything to control this. Is there anything I might have missed?

For info, I have the Windows touchpad setting to scroll 1 line at a time.

I'm using this version:
Directory Opus 13.4 Build 8838 x64
OS 10.0 (B:22631 P:2 T:1) SP 0.0

Thanks for any advice.

2

What kind/model of touchpad is it?

3

It is a Dell Latitude 5540, a few months old. I'm sorry I don't know the exact type of touchpad, and not sure how to find out.

Also it is running Windows 11.

4

Thanks! I've ordered a touchpad which I hope will be the correct type to reproduce and fix what you're seeing.

5

Great, thanks for looking into it.

I'm happy to test anything out or give any more info you may need.

6

The touchpad arrived, and I've confirmed it acts like a "high-precision" touchpad.

But everything works correctly for me with it.

It's worth updating Opus to the current version if you're still on 13.4 (13.5 has been out a while now).

7

Thanks for trying it out. It's disappointing that you cannot reproduce it, as a developer I understand the difficulties.

I've just installed the latest version, 13.6, and the behaviour is the same. A full 2 finger slide top to bottom scrolls about 11 files in the file display, and about 150 lines in the folder display. So it is very different, and for me is very annoying in use.

I'll continue with the trial and see if I manage to get used to it.

8

I've made another change for the next beta which might help, although the before and after results are exactly the same when testing with the hardware I have.

Something to try on your machine:

  • Open File Explorer in e.g. System32, and scroll the file display up and down.

  • Open Notepad and paste a long document into it, then scroll that up and down.

(Edit: Notepad in Windows 11 may be different, since it's no longer using a standard Edit control in Windows 11. I tested with Windows 10. Not sure what a good thing to test with is on Win 11, since so little of the OS itself uses standard controls now. Another text editor may be a good thing to try, although I've found they vary in how they handle the scroll events. Or maybe something like the Event Viewer or Task Scheduler lists, since Microsoft haven't touched those in years.)

Do you see wildly different scroll speeds?

When I compare Explorer and Notepad using the high-precision touchpad, File Explorer scrolls very, very slowly (similar to Opus's file display) while Notepad moves at a normal speed (similar to Opus's folder tree).

It seems to me that high-precision scrolling moves things extremely slowly, which might cause you to massively increase the Windows setting for how far things scroll when using the wheel. But that then makes non-high-precision scrolling too fast, not just in parts of Opus but all over the OS, including things like Notepad.

Given the OS itself has this problem, I'm not sure if there is a solution. Seems a huge mistake on Microsoft's part, unless there is something wrong with the device/drivers that I have.

(In Opus, the tree and file display are different since the Windows tree control can't do per-pixel scrolling. Similar to the editor Notepad uses.)

Edit 2: There are lots of reports about similar scroll speed mismatches with this type of hardware on Microsoft's forums, going back to when Windows 10 came out. I found no solutions on their forum (as always :)), but I don't think this is actually an Opus problem.

One thing we could do is opt-out of high-precision scrolling entirely again, which is what Opus 12 did. But then everything in Opus would scroll like the Folder Tree, which may not be what you want.

Edit 3: DPI / resolution / font sizes may also play a part, as I suspect high-precision scrolling works by pixels without multiplying by the scaling factor, which would make it scroll slower in higher DPIs... But Explorer seems to be the same there, so either it's supposed to do that or Windows itself handles it incorrectly as well. The whole high-precision scrolling thing in Windows seems like an unfixable mess to me, unless I'm missing something.