My two month trial period has ended and I need to decide whether to purchase Directory Opus. I love the performance gains and the ease of use over Windows Explorer and all the great features. But I'm not sure I am ready to make it my default file explorer. Basically, there are two areas where I would like to see improvement: styling and the navigation pane.
Styling - Dir Opus looks like a Windows 7 app. I would really like to see the styling updated to match the current Windows 10 look.
Navigation Pane- In Windows 10 its possible to customize the folders at root level of the navigation pane when the option to "Show all Folders" is unchecked. By default This PC, Quick access, Network and OneDrive are present, and there is the option to include Libraries. But using a program like Winaero Tweaker it is possible to totally customize this. Except that the sort order can't be changed, for some reason. It is also possible to customize the items that are displayed under This PC, using Winaero Tweaker. (Dir Opus doesn't display the contents of This PC correctly.)
What would be best is if Dir Opus got its layout definition for the file browser from the same source that Windows 10 Explorer does. So that, for example, if I make a customization to the navigation pane in Winaero Tweaker the change shows up in Dir Opus. Conversely, if I change a setting in Dir Opus that affects the navigation pane, that change would reflect in Windows Explorer.
So, my question is, how likely is it that either one or both of these issues will be addressed in the not-to-distant future?
If you are on Windows 10 and using Opus 12 with the default config (not someone else's imported configs, which I know some people use), then Opus will look like a Windows 10 desktop app, drawn using the Windows 10 visual style and a "flat" look to match the current style of the OS.
(On Windows 7, it will by default use a more glossy look, with gradients and more "3D" elements, as well as glass icons instead of the flat ones you get on Windows 10.)
You can customize the look and feel of Opus quite a lot if you don't like the defaults. What do you want to change specifically?
You can control which folders Opus shows in the tree via Preferences / Folder Tree / Contents:
Ok, maybe the styling isn't Windows 7. Its been a long time since I ran Win 7. The one thing that really stands out for me is the height of a row item, in both the tree and folder views. Win 10 has a couple pixels of padding top and bottom per row that Opus doesn't have. I haven't found a setting for that.
The bigger issue by far is the folder tree content. I don't like to set "Desktop" as the tree root because the tree can quickly get so deeply nested I get lost. But if I set the folder tree to start at "This PC" then neither Network or OneDrive are displayed. That's the main issue. It would be nice if Opus read its configuration for tree content from the same place as Windows Explorer, but if that's not possible the most important thing is to be able to have Network and OneDrive displayed at root level at the same time as This PC.
The other thing that's fairly important is to get the content of "This PC" right. Dir Opus only shows the drives. By default Windows 10 shows several of the user folders as well as the drives. And it reads the registry to obtain the actual list, making it possible to customize it.
Font sizes in the tree and file display can also be changed, if you want larger targets via another method.
You could turn off Preferences / Folder Tree / Options / Automatically expand to current folder and then it won't expand automatically when you change folders in the file display; only to where you explicitly expand it to in the folder tree, like in Explorer.
We purposely filter out the redundant folders Microsoft added under This PC in Windows 10 as they're already elsewhere, near the top-level, in the folder tree, and This PC is where people are accustomed to going for drives, not random folders like 3D Objects and Videos.
Granted, it was worse when Windows 10 first came out and Explorer had about three copies of all the folders like Documents in very similar places in the folder tree, which was completely ridiculous. Opus initially inherited that mistake (since it checks for additions to This PC in the registry) but we cleaned things up by filtering out the new type of links while keeping the old ways to access the same folders in the tree. In more recent Windows 10 updates, Microsoft seem to have realised what a mess they made and have cleaned things, just up the other way around: removing the old places and keeping the new ones. That seems bad for continuity and it also means there's still a lot of clutter in This PC, which is a questionable is an improvement from how things were, and doesn't makes sense in terms of being able to find a drive quickly when there are 7 random folders now under This PC before you get to the drive letters.
It's something we could add an option for, but only if more people ask for it, and so far people seem happy with how we've done things compared to Explorer.
You can configure as much padding as you want, at least for the file display:
That's good but I would want to be able to do the same for the tree, to keep things balanced.
You could turn off Preferences / Folder Tree / Options / Automatically expand to current folder and then it won't expand automatically when you change folders in the file display; only to where you explicitly expand it to in the folder tree, like in Explorer.
I always have Explorer set so it expands to current folder. Otherwise I get lost.
We purposely filter out the redundant folders Microsoft added under This PC in Windows 10 as they're already elsewhere, near the top-level, in the folder tree, and This PC is where people are accustomed to going for drives, not random folders like 3D Objects and Videos.
Where? In the User folder that's included under Desktop, when Desktop is made the tree root? I won't use Desktop as the tree root. I have two drives in my computer, and with Dir Opus there's never anything more than those two drives under This PC. With Explorer I have customized the folders that appear under This PC and use them all the time.
But none of the above is a show stopper for me. By far the biggest drawback to using Dir Opus, for me, is not being able to make Network and OneDrive root level items. You haven't address this particular issue. What are the chances of this being enabled in the not too distant future?
That's essentially what Leo said, that they've deliberately decided to only show drives as part of This PC, a choice that I personally like, but to each his own.
