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Mac OS X - like file manager and/or ADM-like outliner
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Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Sep 7, 2008 at 03:22 PM
Charles, Robert,
many thanks for your suggestions! I’ll download & test and write back :-)
Cheers
Alexander
Posted by Derek Cornish
Sep 7, 2008 at 05:16 PM
Chris Murtland wrote:
>Not exactly the same thing, but Directory Opus has a “flat view” which lets you view the
>contents of a folder and all its subfolders as if it were a single folder.
>
>Chris
Chris,
I think TotalCommander - which is considerably cheaper than DirectoryOpus - has a similar feature to “flat view”. It is called “Branch View (with subdirectories).” http://www.ghisler.com/
I don’t see a way of configuring it to do Miller columns, though - but I may be wrong; it has a lot of plugins that provide special features (as DO does, too).
Derek
Derek
Posted by Derek Cornish
Sep 7, 2008 at 05:34 PM
Alexander Deliyannis wrote:
>Today I had a collaboration with my graphic designer who, as you probably guessed, has
>been using Macs for ages. Yet I had never been as impressed as today when I saw the OS X
>file manager in action, with the contents of a directory ‘sliding’ out to the right,
>then the contents of the selected subdirectory, etc. etc, until there were several
>columns displaying contents within contents within contents…
>
>The whole thing
>reminded me of ADM’s multiple column view.
>
>So my question is: does anyone know of a
>Windows file manager that can show files in this way?
>
>And, for that matter, does
>anybody know of a Windows outliner that can show multiple hierarchy levels in a way
>similar to ADM?
>
>TIA
>alx
>
Alex -
See Ultra Explorer http://ultraexplorer.mustangpeak.net/
There is a good discussion of Miller columns in the TotalCommander forum, which also discusses why TC doesn’t have this feature, and what approximations can be made to it.
http://www.ghisler.ch/board/viewtopic.php?t=17970&highlight=columns
Derek
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Sep 7, 2008 at 06:33 PM
UltraExplorer is a keeper, though I have the impression that its code has not yet been optimised as I find it a bit ‘reluctant’ (I wouldn’t really say slow) at times.
The only thing I really miss at the moment is that there’s no option for configuring it as a windows explorer replacement (automatically opening when clicking on a folder).
Interestingly, considering that UltraExplorer is a hobby project, it also boasts another NeXT GUI feature suggested by Wikipedia, namely the Shelf: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelf_(computing)
UltraExplorer calls it the DropStack. ShellLess Explorer, mentioned here and promoted by Giveawayoftheday has the same feature going by the way of ToDo Cart. If you wonder what it does, consider it as a Word Spike for files: it collects discontinuous items from various folders, allowing one to perform batch operations like cut/copy on them later on.
Winbrowser also looks interesting, but given that it hasn’t been updated since before Windows XP I think I’ll skip it.
Alexander
Posted by Stephen R. Diamond
Sep 8, 2008 at 12:21 AM
ShellLess Explorer has some ingenious features. The To Do Cart is a good example of both the usefulness of the feature and the program’s limitations masked by the feature. In a slightly more “technical” tabbed file manager, such as xplorer2, you can easily create a spike by creating a new folder tab dedicated to that function. To get items into the dedicated spike folder, you can drag the item to the tab. ShellLess Explore (because of, I think, its greater reliance on Windows native file management) does not let you drag to tabs. Without the ToDo Cart, you would have to occupy precious workspace to duplicate the spike functionality.