Total Commander 7.5: What's New?

“What's new?” Is a traditional article from the Russian-speaking community Total Commander, coming out after the next version of this file manager. At this time, the first to familiarize themselves with the article suggest habra people.

The new version of TC at first caused the most contradictory feelings: on the one hand, the changes are quite global, on the other - global does not mean good. Frankly speaking, I expected more from the announced innovations, but there were also some unsubstantiated innovations that turned out to be surprisingly pleasant.
Let's try to figure out what the Swiss programmer associates freaked out this time.

Unicode

Without a doubt, Unicode support is important and necessary, and if the implementation is sub-late, then it is only a little. But everything is supported qualitatively, files with names in Hebrew, Katakana, or even some gibberish will now be correctly displayed and processed in TC and all its tools. And even in plugins, the Unicode versions of which can exist alongside their non-Unicode ancestors (they will get the prefix u for the extension). Documentation for the updated API is already available, you can start experiments.
Extended support for encodings appeared in the standard viewer (Lister). Instead of the previous three (ANSI, ASCII, and one custom user), you can choose any encoding for which there are fonts in the system.
With all this, TC still remains a non-Unicode application - say, localization files and menus are still stored in single-byte-encoded files. But this, frankly, does not matter at all.
Hint : It would seem - what could be wrong with a uniquely useful and enjoyable change? Nothing, if you've used fonts with Unicode support before. But fans of non-unicode fonts will have to make a choice between unicode support and their favorite font. I have already found the unicode analogue of my beloved Fixedsys, for which I am pleased.
')

Domestic associations

The mechanism of internal associations is cool. This is very cool. This is unreal cool: TC can now ignore system associations using its own. The plus is obvious: when using a pre-configured TC, everything will work the same regardless of the system settings. Considering how many people like to carry all the necessary software along with Total on a flash drive, one can say - this is definitely cool (and gives one more reason for jokes about the TC-based operating system). And those who simply launch the old Total on the new system will also like this one — for example, set up once to link text files to your favorite editor, and that’s all, no more Notepad. A binding, by the way, is not just done by extension — it can also be performed for groups of files, exactly the same way as when adjusting the backlight, for example.
Now the main thing is to force yourself to do this setting once =).

Breadcrumb

Breadcrumb ("bread crumbs") - a way to navigate a la Windows Vista Explorer - dynamic navigation menus for each level in the displayed file path. Now, TC also has this mechanism, and it is implemented as an add-on above the panel title.

In itself, the appearance of a new navigation functionality pleases. In certain circumstances, navigating directories through Breadcrumb is faster than any other way (in Explorer, that's for sure).
But for some reason, Gisler decided not just to make his Breadcrumb, but also add a little bit of whore and blackjack to it. The devil, as always, dwells in trifles - and these little things were not taken into account: switching to menus was not very convenient. To display the hierarchical menu, you need either a bunch of extra mouse clicks, or the need to aim the cursor at the highlighted portion of the menu, and it turned out to be difficult to understand the logic of Breadcrumb behavior. But for many, he simply interfered simply with his fact of existence - clicking on the panel title constantly called up the Breadcrumb menu, even when it was not at all required.
All this caused a wave of discontent among testers, because in the process of beta testing, a scatter of settings was added to Breadcrumb - moreover, they were hidden, i.e. only editable by the settings file. With their help, in principle, you can still adjust the behavior, but one important drawback is not eliminated by anything. This is the size of the breadcrumb, and more specifically the height. Compare it with your Windows counterpart - Explorer doesn't need to be targeted with a mouse.
You can try to guess the reason for this minimization: there are two TC panels, respectively, and Breadcrumb places in width are two times smaller. Height reduced proportionally. But why not make the sizes customizable? Even then, the panel will display an ugly scroller for paths that do not fit on the panel? .. Of course, there is an option to control Breadcrumb from the keyboard, and if you get used to it, it is quite convenient, although it duplicates, in fact, navigation in file panels directly.
However, like any other unsatisfied innovation, Breadcrumb can be safely disabled. But still - not the most thoughtful implementation of a completely interesting idea is distressing.

FTP manager and cataloger

FTP account management tool has gained the ability to catalog. The flat list is replaced by a tree structure, which allows you to conveniently group the connections. If you have more than two dozen of them, and TC is your main tool for working with FTP - rejoice, bookmarks on FTP can be organized exactly the same way as bookmarks in your favorite browser.
But the way in which the new FTP manager appeared in the first beta versions plunged me into indignation. It was frankly unfinished, there were practically no editing functions. Nothing can be done with directories: they cannot be renamed, they cannot be moved and regrouped. You can only delete.
Sorry sight.
Fortunately, not only I was indignant about this, but Gisler still listens to vox populi. Part of the shortcomings was eliminated, as a result, in the release, the renaming of directories is already available. But the movement - alas, no. Apparently the voice of the people should have been louder.

Totally safe!

FTP changes affected not only the interface. The long-standing problem of securely storing FTP passwords has apparently been resolved completely. In addition to the old version with password encryption using a standard key, it is now possible to encrypt using a password specified by the user. This password is not stored anywhere, and is entered once - at the first request. During user activity, TC stores this master password in memory as an array of pointers to characters, and each character is also locked up with a random number, which virtually eliminates the “password recovery” by third-party software. Paranoids can configure advanced security settings — say, TC can “forget” the master password after a time has elapsed, when the window is minimized, or when the screensaver is started.
The ability to use the master password is now in plug-ins. In principle, no one interfered with the developers, if necessary, to implement it independently, but it is more logical and easier to use ready-made mechanisms.

Toolbar

In the previous version, the toolbar has already been radically redone, with the result that it acquired support for XP themes and enhanced display capabilities. That was not the end of the deal: now the capabilities of the panel are logically improved.
First, the panel is available from the keyboard. The truth is, this is not the assignment of hotkeys to buttons that many people wanted, it is the movement of the focus on it.
Secondly, now the dimensions of the panel are not limited to two rows. Of course, this was never critical, but it looked very strange when a part of the TC interface could simply “disappear” when resized.
Thirdly, we added the ability to split the panel into rows in arbitrary places. Why this is needed is not entirely clear, because at the same time the useful screen space is lost. But this does not interfere, if not use.
Fourth, and, of course, the main ones: the buttons in the toolbar can invoke other panels in the form of a menu. In fact, the built-in (and therefore more convenient) analogue of utilities like TCMenu. Everything is done smoothly and without unnecessary whistles: on one button you can hang up a call to one menu panel, without drop-down submenus (and rightly so - there are a lot of other options for branchy menus). Difficulties arise, unless, at the first attempts to set up a new functionality, it is not immediately clear what tick its support is included. I'll tell you - this tick is called “In the form of a menu” (“Show as menu”) and appears only when a button is called up to call a file with the TC toolbar.

Faylofichi

I noticed that in every new version of TC some kind of file-handling mechanism is added, which everyone has been asking for a long time, but which is ignored all the time. In the previous version, file comparison was added when overwriting on the fly and improved BTM. In this - setting automatic behavior when copying. Before starting the operation, you can configure the reaction of the TC to the files encountered that need to be rewritten. You can, as before, request confirmation from the user each time, or you can specify a rule according to which TC will determine whether to overwrite - for example, copy only new files, or automatically rename old ones.
At the same time, it became possible to copy to several receivers at once - if you select several directories and enable the corresponding option, the copied files will appear in each of them. And the started copying process got the Pause button (earlier it was possible to suspend only background operations).

Etc

Below are described all the nice little things, which in every update of TC is a car and a small truck.

• Improved compatibility when working under Windows x64. The most noticeable and obvious improvement is full context menus for 64-bit programs. This is implemented through a wrapper (find the TCMDX64.EXE file in the TC directory - this is it) that intercepts the menu call.
• Extended support for custom file comments. Despite the fact that Ghisler does not add many necessary functions (for example, support for comments to files with Unicode characters in the name), referring to the impossibility of a one-sided change in the author's descript.ion format, some improvements are still being made. In this version, we received an increase in the maximum comment length to 4 KB, and support for multi-line comments.
  Hint : if you add a comment to a file with unicode in the name manually in descript.ion, then TC will display it normally. Obviously, the restriction is artificial.
• Improved individual directory trees. This addition, quite ambiguously perceived by many users after the appearance in the previous version, has been substantially refined. A full-fledged Drag & Drop appeared, almost all the functions available in the main panels were supported. I don’t know if these improvements are enough to start using these trees - after all, they are designed for users migrating to TC from Explorer, and I, as you know, haven't been among these for a long time.
• New modifier key: Win can be added to keyboard shortcuts with Alt, Shift and Ctrl.
• Quick filter. A trifle, but I can not imagine how you could manage without it. Press Ctrl + S, we start typing characters - and only those files remain in the panel, in the names of which these characters exist. Conveniently incredible, besides, it turned out that the filter is expanded with plugins. There is already a QuickSearch eXtended plugin that allows you to create a quick filter using patterns, regular expressions, and more.
• Improved archiving: now there is built-in support for zip encryption and multi-threading of the RAR unpacker (if there is an appropriate version of unrar.dll).
• Support progress bars in the taskbar of Windows 7.
• Last but not least: Russian in the distribution .

All this, of course, is far from a complete list of improvements and changes - the transfer of fixes alone will take a couple of pages in small size. Want to see the full - HISTORY.TXT to help you, as always. And if there are any questions - RU.TCKB and the Russian community Total Commander will always help with the answers.
And of course the link to the official website of the program: ghisler.com