Miscellaneous things

Well there had to be a miscellaneous section didn’t there! Here are all the minor changes (in no particular order) that don’t fit into any of the other categories in this document.

• In Preferences / Layouts and Styles / Layouts, Lister layouts can now be organised into folders.

• Windows 8 and above add a significant delay before launching applications at startup. The new option Preferences / Launching Opus / Startup now indicates if this delay is in effect, and has buttons to remove or restore it.
  
  Changing this option affects all programs launched via the Start Menu startup folder, not just Opus, and the setting is in the registry rather than the Directory Opus configuration (so you'll need to change it on individual machines if desired). It's a Windows setting, not an Opus one - we just provide a convenient way to change it in Preferences.
  
  For those who are interested, the option has the effect of setting KEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\ Serialize:Startupdelayinmsec (DWORD) = 0 to remove the delay, or deleting the value to restore it.

• The Set LISTERTITLE command (and the Display / Options / Custom title option in Preferences) can now use the code %G to display the target of the current folder if it's a junction or soft-link.

• There is a new optional checksum cache for large files located on NTFS partitions. The checksum cache is only used if specifically requested - the GetSizes command has a new USEHASHCACHE argument, and Clipboard COPYNAMES has a new hashcache parameter to enable it. The Duplicate File Finder can also use it, either by setting the option in the user interface, or by specifying the MD5=cache argument for the Find command. Note that cached checksums will only be updated if a file's last modified timestamp or size has changed.

• The FTP Address Book now allows a private key file to be specified explicitly for SSH connections (previously you had to use the external Pageant tool to use a key file for authentication instead of a password).

• The Lister now automatically moves out of the current drive if it detects the drive has been removed. Files on the drive which are open in the viewer pane will be closed as well.

• The Folder Tree / Contents page in Preferences has an option to hide the Homegroup from the folder tree, and separate options for Hidden and Protected operating system folders.

• Added option to the Folders / Virtual Folders page in Preferences to change what happens when you do a Windows Search from the Desktop virtual folder. By default, Opus now only searches your personal Desktop folder (/desktopdir) and, if configured to appear, the shared desktop folder (/commondesktopdir). If the setting is changed (or if native display of the Desktop folder is off), you will return to the old behavior: The search will include the profile and shared Desktop folders and also the Documents folder, and potentially others. (It is up to Windows exactly which folders are searched, and you'll see similar from Explorer.)

• "Opus" audio format (no relation :)) tags can be read by the AudioTags plugin. (Read-only for file display columns, rename and scripting. Not supported in the metadata editor at time of writing.)

• Added support for MP4 and basic MKV metadata under Windows 7 and up.

• A version of the FileTypeDiag tool has been built into Opus. (File > Diagnostic, from the File Types dialog.)

• Updated to 7z.dll 15.12. RAR unpacking is done using 7z by default again, since it now supports RAR 5 and has more accurate timestamps, but you can switch back to UnRAR.dll if preferred.

• Various Preferences settings which used to allow a user command to be chosen from a drop-down list (e.g. the desktop double-dlick settings) now allow any single-line command to be typed. This means you no longer need to set up a user command just to run a single-line internal or script command.

• Opus now has better support for dark color schemes:

  • On the Display / Colors and Fonts page in Preferences, the Pane borders section has new options Use for lister column headers and Use for lister scrollbars. (The scrollbar option is only available if Windows visual styles are active, and is also disabled if WindowBlinds is detected).

  • Labels for disabled toolbar buttons are now faded instead of being drawn using the system “gray” color, so they'll look better with non-standard colors, especially inverted or very dark colors.

• The new folder alias /scripts takes you to the script add-ins folder (equivalent of /dopusdata/Script AddIns).

• Zip AES encryption now uses the WinZip standard instead of the PKWare one. This seems to work with more applications, including popular ones like WinRar and 7-Zip which did not work with Opus encrypted archives in the past.

• The animated GIF plugin supports image flipping (mirroring).

• The Miscellaneous / Advanced section in Preferences has a new clipboard_image_paste_dpi option. When turned on, pasting clipboard image data to a file (by pressing Ctrl+V in a Lister) will automatically scale it to compensate for the system DPI. A similar option added to the dialog displayed by the Clipboard PASTE AS=ask command.

• The Miscellaneous / Advanced: gloss_and_gradients Preferences setting now has an Automatic option which is selected by default. When set to Automatic, a flat and simple look is chosen if on Windows 8 or above, and a shiny look with gradients is chosen on Windows 7 and below.

• You can now disable internal image viewers via Preferences / Miscellaneous / Advanced: viewer_disable_internal. For example, this allows you to divert the TIFF viewer to a third-party ActiveX control which handles multi-page TIFFs.

• The font used in the metadata control (in the Lister and the Viewer) is now configurable via Preferences / Display / Colors & Fonts.

• Added Preferences / Folder Tabs / Options / Click selected tab to go to previous one option.

• In Windows 10, the new Quick Access folder can be shown in the folder tree by turning on the Preferences / Folder Tree / Contents / Quick Access option. The new /quickaccess path alias can be used to navigate to the Quick Access folder from a button (e.g. Go /quickaccess).

• Added mycomputerfull argument for breadcrumbs pathfields, to enable the display of folders in the drop-down for the Computer folder.

• You can now block the Movie plugin from handling certain extensions (even if their registry information specifies they are video types) by adding them to the list of extensions with a ~ before them. For example .avi,.mpg,~.wmv would tell the plugin to handle .avi and .mpg but ignore .wmv files.
• The Navigation Lock algorithm has been redesigned to hopefully address various complaints about the old algorithm (in terms of how and when it goes out of sync). It should be much better now at recovering after having gone out of sync. The "slave tabs" system now uses the same algorithm as Navigation Lock in terms of staying in and going out of sync (i.e. when it goes out of sync it will show a warning message rather than changing the tab to show the same folder as the other side). The term "Slave Tab" has been replaced with "Navigation Lock" in the user interface to avoid confusion (since there's really only one system now instead of two completely separate ones).

• The Scripts Preferences page has been redesigned:

  • It now uses a multicolumn list to display the list of scripts. Columns can be added/removed by right-clicking the column header.
  • Information about the selected script is displayed at the bottom of the list if not shown in a column.
  • If a script supports configuration clicking its name now opens the configuration dialog.
  • The list now remembers the previously selected script and reselects it next time it opens.
  • Scripts that fail to parse are no longer removed from the list; instead they will display the failure reason in the Status column.
  • Scripts that you disable are now completely disabled - no code from them is run at all. (previously, the OnInit function would run and commands/columns would still be queried).
  • The new Import command can be used to import a script (as well as drag-and-drop like before).
  • The new Delete command can be used to remove a script. It deletes the script file and removes the record of any configuration for it (so that if later on you add a new script with the same name, it won't inherit the old script's configuration).
  • The new Disable All Scripts command lets you disable all script add-ins at once - individual enable/disable states will be preserved. The new Set SCRIPTDISABLE command lets you toggle this from a button or hotkey.
  • Scripts can now specify a group in their OnInit function (using the ScriptInitData.group property). If any scripts specify a group this will be reflected in the Preferences list.
  • Scripts can also specify a group for their configuration values using the new ScriptInitData.config_groups property (this accepts a Map in the same way as the config_desc property).
• Added script support for Windows shell properties, making it easy for a script to enumerate properties in the system and retrieve the properties for a file.