Great New Feature: Simple But Will Save A Lot of Time

I just thought of a great additional feature you can add that is really simple but it’ll improve everyone’s productivity. Currently, in Windows, you have the option to choose whether or not you need to confirm deletions of files or folders.

Tell me if I'm wrong but when you are making this decision, a lot of you don’t know which one to pick. On the one hand, you really hate the slight, yet annoying effort it takes to move your mouse to the dialog box and click the button to confirm the deletion of a file or folder. On the other hand, you want to be sure you don't accidentally delete an important file or folder.

In the past, you've actually inadvertently deleted an important file, right? And, without that dialog box, you would not have noticed, right? So, to be safe, you decide and reluctantly check the box that requires Windows to confirm all deletions. But, don't you hate confirming every file deletions you have to make multiple times per day?

Instead of confirming a deletion, what if something simply flashes across your screen. It’s very temporary and informs you that a file or folder is being deleted. Something you won’t miss and something unique so you know it refers to deletion to the recycle bin. Something not too short but not too long. What do you think about this possible new feature? Should be easy to make for a Directory Opus developer, no? And, I don’t think anyone has ever done this before.

You probably mean something like the fly-ins or popups used on most webpages these days.

I'm not sure I would like things to pop in and out directly over my DO windows (like it's on webpages), but I'm with you when it comes to some kind of notification system in DO. Some kind of popup in some corner of the desktop would be nice. Windows has the balloon system, it would do the job I guess. Not sure how win10 does things with the notification center. And.. it should be usable for scripts as well.. and be able to play a "ding".. o)

For my part - I think just having a "notification" only isn't all that useful... my suggestion would be to make it a hybrid between a "notification" and the current "confirmation" dialog.

How about a notification that files have been deleted, but with an oppty to Pause or Cancel the deletion - but which will otherwise carry on without user intervention after a configurable delay.

This way, you have something that will hopefully be unobtrusive to let you know whats happening, as well as give you a brief chance to interrupt it in case you made a mistake... But which will otherwise do what you've already told it to do (delete the files) without further interruption to whatever file deleting frenzied workflow you happen to be in the middle of.

So - sort of like file deletion "queuing"... similar to the current copy queuing.

You mean, after the files have been deleted, you like to pause the progress, yes? o)
Just kidding, I think I see what you mean, I'm not sure this would work well with what we have already with the status bar and progress dialogs. A possibly easy thing to do is an "X" on the status bar progress items to quickly stop a running copy/delete/process.
There is a context menu on these items to "stop" and "resume", but it's not handy and not easily accessable if things are going south.

If items from a queue are done, a notification of some kind would be nice in every case.
A delete queue would be nice of course, an unattended delete mode and an option to skip whole folders in any of the unattended modes as well.. and and.. o)

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One idea for notification might be something like the green arrow animation when you start operation with auto-hidden progress dialog.
Anything else - just maintain your backups.

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I actually mean something much more discreet that doesn't take focus away from whatever you are doing. Something that might be in the center of the monitor for 500 ms that says something like "Deleting file..." in cursive. Or, perhaps something in the bottom right that flashes in a bright color momentarily. Something that makes it look classy and beautiful. I really don't know. I'm not a designer so I don't know what would look cool.

It wouldn't be an ugly dialog box but something more...I don't know. The length of time it would appear would be the same length of time it would have taken you to have moved your mouse to the dialog box to click to confirm deletion. And, the message would disappear even before the deletion finished.

I figured that a Pause or Cancel option wouldn't be necessary because if it really was accidential, you can always just press Control-Z. But, a copy queuing or deletion queuing doesn't sound like a bad idea!

However, the current copy queuing is too intrusive like in Teracopy, in my humble opinion. You really don't need a big dialog box to tell you that a file is copying. If it's a large folder of files, I think it should still be off to the side, barely noticeable. For example, a tray icon can be blinking green, indicating that things are being copied. And, you can double click it to get detailed info if you want. And, then click out of focus to make it disappear.

Maybe there can even be an animation of the file actually being deleted. The components of the thumbnail disintegrate in a very small, quick animation. If it's a row in details view, it's erased horizontally.

Maybe I'm going a little overboard with this. But, everyone gets the idea. I think it would be a nice addition. I really hate moving my mouse to the button to click a dialog box.

I've tried setting it so that the mouse appears at the dialog button automatically but that's even worse. You lose your place with your mouse. You forget where the mouse was previously.

There are options for that in Preferences.

There is an option that momentarily notifies you that something is being deleted. Something that flashes for 1-2 seconds that has no focus? Something maybe in the upper right corner that says, "Deleting...". Where is the option?

No, there's no option for that for delete. There is an option for something similar for copy, which is the part of your message that Leo was replying to (you can tell the context from the text of your message that he quoted).