Right-click any file or folder and select "Properties"... The window that pops up seems to have "always on top" status, so it shows on top of everything else (even non-DOpus windows). Normally this isn't an issue, but I've had numerous occasions where a long-running job spawned out of here (i.e. compression or security changes propagation) leaves an unmovable, always-on-top window hanging around for a long time, that makes it difficult to get other work done.
I have one going right now when I asked Windows to compress an 80GB text file (which takes a non-trivial amount of time)... The request spawned a window showing the current progress of the compression job, but that made the "properties" window unmovable, and both windows are "always-on-top" until the job is done.
This isn't the case with File Explorer, the "Properties" window behaves like other windows and is not "always on top". I don't always remember to fire up File Explorer for a job like this until after it is in progress...
I looked around in the preferences and I can't find anything related to this. Am I missing some option to disable this behavior?
The choice to make the Properties dialogs on-top dates back at least 10 years to Opus 9, and I'm not sure of the exact reasons. It may just be to work around the problem that Properties dialogs are so easy to lose if you click another window, since they do not have taskbar buttons.
(Recent versions of Explorer now seem to create a taskbar button for them by creating a dummy parent window, which is another solution added a long time after that was done, but the dialogs themselves do not have taskbar buttons.)
Also because the Properties dialogs are usually not kept open for long, although your example is a valid exception to that.
If it's only a problem when compressing files using NTFS, you can do that in Opus via the Attributes dialog, which should work better:
Thanks for the tip. I have one other use case that has given me grief, and that is when I need to make permissions/security changes to some files. It is the same scenario... I open the "Properties" window and make the change to a folder, and then Windows crawls around to all of the files inside of the folder that I have updated to apply the change recursively and has a progress window open for this. Sometimes I am updating a file share that has many thousands of files inside, so it takes a while, and the always-on-top (unmovable) is open for the whole time.
I'd love to see a config option to toggle this "Always-on-top" behavior, it seems less necessary since you can find the properties windows in the taskbar now...
