The Jobs Bar

If you tend to have multiple file operations happening at once you have probably found it hard to manage the individual progress dialogs that Opus creates. The Jobs Bar is designed to make it easier to keep track of multiple simultaneous file operations. It is a small bar that appears at the bottom of the Lister, and displays a button for each currently running job.

                    

You can configure the Jobs Bar to appear automatically whenever a job is started (with the Preferences / File Operations / Progress Indicators / Display the jobs bar automatically when starting a new job option), or you can open and close it manually (using the Set JOBSBAR command). The buttons show basic information about the job (the action, source and destination) and the current progress in the form of a bar graph. The color of the bar graph indicates the current state of the job (running, paused or error).

The Jobs Bar buttons also let you manage the jobs directly. Click a button to display its progress dialog - click it again to hide it.

                    

If you right-click the button a context menu is displayed that lets you pause, resume or abort the job.

If you're using the Jobs Bar you may also like to configure Opus to minimize all progress indicators automatically. This can dramatically streamline your workflow - if you are launching multiple simultaneous file operations it can be incredibly distracting to have progress indicators popping up in front of the Lister every time you launch an operation. This can be enabled by turning on the Minimize progress indicators option on the Preferences / File Operations / Progress Indicators page. You can also set progress indicators to only minimize when the Jobs Bar is visible - that way, you can manually open the Jobs Bar when you want to start a lot of operations simultaneously and have the normal behavior when the Jobs Bar is closed.

Note that when the Jobs Bar is visible and a new operation is started with its progress indicator minimized, a subtle animation is used to provide visual feedback of the newly started job.

If the Jobs Bar is set to display automatically, you can also choose to prevent the individual progress indicator windows from appearing on the taskbar at all. If you turn on the Prevent progress indicators from showing on the taskbar option progress indicators won't appear on the taskbar or the Alt+Tab program list - when minimized (either manually, or automatically using the above option) they will instead be completely hidden. You can keep track of their progress and redisplay the progress indicator using the Jobs Bar buttons. If no Jobs Bars are visible (say because you have closed the Lister) the progress indicators will reappear on the taskbar automatically.