Paired Hot Paths

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tajmone
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Paired Hot Paths

Post by tajmone »

Hi everyone,
this is my first post here, just bought Salamander recently.

After working for a while with Salamander, I realize that the common scenario I work with is that of having a given folder on the left, and another given folder to the right -- ie: when working on a project I commonly have 2 reference folders, for example: work / publish; source / destination; local / remote; etc.

Hot Paths are one of the key features that bought me to the idea of passing to Salamander to improve my workflow.

If Hot Paths could also be saved and retrived in pairs (Left / Right Panel), switching between projects would become a breeze! — and it would also half the icons/text in the Hot Path bar (Left/Right pairs would come with a single label), which quickly gets cluttered.

Any thoughts on this?

Best regards,

Tristano (Italy)
https://github.com/tajmone
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SelfMan
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Re: Paired Hot Paths

Post by SelfMan »

You might check this:
http://www.altap.cz/salamander/help/sal ... ask_param/
and then the Help "Customizing User Menu"

Hit F9, choose Customize, hit INSERT key to enter new item, name it and set the parameters like here:

command: $(SalDir)\salamand.exe
argument: -O -L "D:\\Project\\ABC" -R "D:\\Publish\\CBA"
Initial directory: $(FullPath)

Then just hit F9 and select yout menu item

You can also use the -P parameter to specify which panel should be active after the menu execution.
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tajmone
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Re: Paired Hot Paths

Post by tajmone »

Thanks @SelfMan,

this is a cool solution... requires a bit of setup, but I guess it's worth for repetitive tasks.

I will look into how to automate this task of assigning the current R and L panes' path to a new custom user menu.

B.R.
https://github.com/tajmone
Jan Rysavy
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Re: Paired Hot Paths

Post by Jan Rysavy »

You may also look at Automation plugin (part of Altap Salamander):

http://www.altap.cz/developers/automation/
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tajmone
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Re: Paired Hot Paths

Post by tajmone »

Hi @SelfMan,

SelfMan wrote:Hit F9, choose Customize, hit INSERT key to enter new item, name it and set the parameters like here:

command: $(SalDir)\salamand.exe
argument: -O -L "D:\\Project\\ABC" -R "D:\\Publish\\CBA"
Initial directory: $(FullPath)
It's now a while that I've been using this solution you proposed. It greatly improved my working experience, I can now switch from a "workspace" configuration to another very quickly. I usually create a menu entry of this type for my GitHub project, so that I have on the left the contents of the actual Git controlled folder, and on the right my working folder for that project, where I store all my notes, temporary files, links, resources, ecc.

There is one problem though: it doesn't work well with multiple instance of Salamander open. Somehow, when I inoke the user menu that I've created to set right- and left-panel to my custom paths, it often ends up changing the paths of another Salamander running instance — which make me loose the working directories I was in for that instance. I'm not sure, but I think that it applies the action on the first Slamander instance that was opened.

Anyhow, I have to be careful when I use it with multiple open instances.

Also, I'm looking to automate the creation procession of this type of custom menu. I would like to create a script that can detect the path of left and right panels and create a new user menu already filled-in, using a template for the example you provided. I'll try to achieve this with the Automation plugin, and if I manage to I'll share the results.

But I'm still of the idea that this should become a feature-request for Salamander and not remain something that can be achived through workarounds. After all, Salamander is a dual pane file explorer — dual only! — so it makes sense to me that it should also offer dual-bookmarks. And I think it should also allow to specify that a single-path bookmark should target a specific pane (right or left) or even both at once. Maybe this could be achieved with some checkbox in the bookmarks property where users can chose: right, left, right+left, both, or any — where "any" means that it would target the pane currently in focus. Or it could acheive through a right-clicking context menu for bookmarks, offering similar choices as to where the bookmarked path should be opened.


The main reason that urged me to buy a Salamander license was that I was tired of having to Alt-Tab through dozens of windows in order to have 2 File Explore instance side by side so that I could carry out file operations from one folder to the other. Also, in Windows 10 aligning two windows side-by-side doesn't always work well when there are many minimized windows — it often alignes them as if there was a third window maximized, so that you have to manually resize right- and left-explore windows. Of course, other reasons also weighed on the decision to pass to Salamander, but dual pane file explorering was definitely the main reason that moved me to Salamander.
https://github.com/tajmone
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SelfMan
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Re: Paired Hot Paths

Post by SelfMan »

One of the possible workarrounds is to store the configuration in a file (Options > Export configuration).
Then delete everything except the [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Altap\Altap Salamander 3.08\User Menu] items (notice, this is for Salamander 3.08) and create a config-profile-01.reg, config-profile-02.reg, config-profile-03.reg etc. depending on your needs.

Then create a Salamander shortcut: Altap Salamander [project name].lnk and specify thecommand line like "salamand.exe -C config-profile-01.reg"
This way the instance will load the specified config file. All other configuration entries are loaded from the registry.

What I cannot answer is the question about the user menu influencing other instances of salamander then the own.
This might be a question to Altap to implement a $(Self) variable which would pass the arguments and initial directory to the current instance where the user menu was invoked from.
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tajmone
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Re: Paired Hot Paths

Post by tajmone »

Thanks @SelfMan,

this is a very interesting approach.

I could easily create a script (or a small exe console app) to automate the creation of a new Registry entry, using some template, and therefore automate the creation of a new menu entry for setting right and left panels. All I need to do is to call this script/app from a custom user menu that passes to it the right and left panels path, and then the script creates the registry key. This should be easily done with Salamander vars.

Very cool tip indeed, it «unlocked it all» and headed me in the right direction :wink:
https://github.com/tajmone
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SelfMan
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Re: Paired Hot Paths

Post by SelfMan »

No problem, you are welcome...
Have a happy new year!
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