I am a new Directory Opus user (I'm still evaluating it actually) and I have a few questions. This question is about keyboard navigation in the breadcrumbs field.
As things sit right now, if I click F4, focus moves to the breadcrumbs field and allows me to edit the path by hand. What I would actually like is the ability to navigate through the breadcrumbs field using the keyboard in the same way as I can navigate through menus. I don't want the breadcrumbs field to be converted to text when I hit F4, I want it to stay buttoney. So for example left arrow would move the 'intra-breadcrumbs-field' focus to the parent folder. Down-arrow would show the child folder dropdown if necessary and move the 'intra-breadcrumbs-field' focus to the next child folder in that dropdown. Right-arrow would 'descend' into the currently selected child folder in the dropdown (only in the breadcrumbs field). None of this navigation would change the directory being shown in the lister until I hit 'enter', which would 'commit' the breadcrumbs field path and return focus to the lister.
I don't think there's any way to do that at the moment. As you say, when the field gets the keyboard focus it turns into a normal path field to let you edit the path.
After thinking about this some more, I realize that this feature would be gilding the lily. Directory Opus already provides more or less the functionality I want -- efficient keyboard navigation of the folder tree -- just in a different way. I can treat the lister itself as the 'menu' for the current folder. The breadcrumbs field provides context. The only thing it doesn't give me is the ability to jump directly to an ancestor other than the parent, and the ability to build a path and then commit it. The former can be easily accomplished by pressing backspace multiple times (more easily than using the breadcrumbs field actually) and the latter is a nice to have.
I'm used to the functionality from my IDE but the key difference is that the main window in Opus is the lister, which already provides the functionality needed to navigate this way, while in my IDE it's the editor, which doesn't.