Download Directory Opus 12.18

GPSoftware has released version 12.17 of its file manager Directory Opus. This program is in a sense comparable with Total Commander, but with more extensive options about exactly what information should be displayed and how. The program nestles deep in Windows and is therefore more intended as a replacement for Windows Explorer.

Directory Opus is versatile and extremely configurable, both in functionality and appearance. That is also the biggest problem, because the program can certainly appear complex to novice users. Directory Opus works on Windows XP and higher, and is available in a 32bit and a 64bit version. The program can 60 days being tested; after that, a license of 89 Australian dollars must be purchased, which amounts to approximately 55 euros. Since version 10.2, there is also a less extensive version, for the equivalent of 30 euros. The changelog for this release shows the following list of changes and improvements:

These changes are new for 12.18:

• When in Preferences / Folders / Folder Formats, the existing format’s page override checkboxes are now preserved when adding it as a new Favorite Format or pasting it as a new Path Format.
• The new “mixed DPI mitigations” setting is now off by default, after a couple of people reported problems with it in the betas. It can still be turned on via Preferences / Miscellaneous / Advanced for those who want / need it.

These changes were part of the 12.17.1 – 12.17.6 beta updates:

• The image viewer now lets you scroll left and right with the mouse wheel by holding the Alt key. (Assuming the wheel is set to scroll the image in Preferences.)
• The standalone viewer’s factory default toolbar now has Open Containing Folder and Refresh in the File menu, and a button to open the containing folder on the main toolbar. (To pick up these changes, you’ll need to right-click the empty part of your viewer toolbar and choose the option to reset it.)
• The Open With menu now includes “Metro” applications from the Microsoft Store.
• Added the SHELLVERB and SHELLCLASS arguments to the FileType command. This provides the ability to launch files and folders via the Windows shell, bypassing Opus’s internal logic, with the options of specifying the verb and file type or application class to use.
• When inline-renaming a file, Ctrl-W to upper-case all words now leaves the file extension alone (unless it is part of the text selection).
• You can now give the Metadata pane keyboard focus via Set FOCUS = metapane (eg if you want to use a hotkey to give it focus).
• Fixed a problem which meant sorting by File Count columns didn’t work reliably after changing/reading folders.
• Fixed inline rename in icon and thumbnails modes not always expanding the edit control’s height when needed.
• Added support for a method of hiding special folders (eg OneDrive) from the folder tree which is used by File Explorer but was ignored by Opus until now.
• Added support hiding the OneDrive Business folder from the tree via Preferences.
• Fixed problem where a dialog displayed by a function (eg the Copy As dialog) could end up being hidden if the progress indicator was minimized.
• Improved positioning logic when the Default Lister is set to open “always over the mouse pointer”. While adjusting the position to avoid existing Listers, minimized windows are now ignored and if there isn’t room on the bottom / right it now also tries the top / left.
• Ctrl + Mouse Wheel to change font / thumbnail size in Listers is now back to normal, after the up / down directions were swapped in 12.17.
• Toolbar buttons which run Set SHOWFILTERFILENAME = regex: … and similar using regular expressions now toggle and indicate their states correctly.
• When the standalone viewer is in windowed mode and auto-sizes, it can now grow slightly wider and taller, into Windows 10’s invisible resizing borders.
• Fixed viewer issue where you could not scroll all the way to the right of images wider than 32768 pixels (after any zoom was applied).
• Fixed problem with searching for a string in the text viewer in hex mode, via the FAYT (it wouldn’t be case sensitive in some situations).
• Internal viewer performance fix when drag-selecting images.
• The “Size on Disk” column now shows 0 bytes for offline files (eg Dropbox / Onedrive files that are only stored in the cloud).
• Improved efficiency in folders with a large number of sub-folders when the file count column was turned on.
• Fix for Excel’s preview handler not resizing correctly when first opened.
• The command Copy TO = “ask: {sourcepath}” now works correctly.
• Fix for very rare crash that could happen when changing folders while Flat View was refreshing.
• Fix for Preview Handlers and ActiveX viewers not resizing correctly when using Remote Desktop between Windows 10 machines at different DPIs.
• Fixed new Listers not being correctly snapped to a monitor when opening under certain DPI situations.
• The Directory Opus Archives -> Extract Here context menu command now works from within a file collection (eg from Find Results – the files will be placed in the same folder as the zip file itself).
• Fix for Opus running with Below Normal priority if launched via the installer, or via Explorer Replacement from an elevated process when not already running.
• Fixed some 32-bit programs not appearing in the Open With menu if they registered themselves in a particular way.
• Transition Animations are no longer used on systems with mixed DPIs. (High DPI is fine, but all monitors need use the same scaling for the animations to work correctly.)
• Fixed shadows on certain elements, and highlights around Preferences search results, looking wrong over windows which straddle monitors of different DPIs.
• Experimental workaround for pop-up menus and tooltips opening with the wrong size or position in some mixed-DPI situations. (This is a fairly awful bug in Windows 10 when using monitors that don’t all have the same DPI.) If this causes problems (eg flashing windows when menus open), it can be turned off via Preferences / Miscellaneous / Advanced [Troubleshooting]: mixed_dpi_mitigations. (As of the 12.18 release, this is turned off by default. See above.)
• Fixed a problem when the Rename command was run with filenames provided by the {file} command sequence and a filename contained a wildcard character.
• Fixed memory leak when pasting text or image data into new files via Ctrl-V in the file display.
• Fixed crash when attempting to load extremely large PNG files.
• Fix for Rename dialog moving keyboard focus to the Mode drop-down shortly after it opened.
• When using Tools> Map Network Drive, the Lister should no longer go behind another window when you finish using the dialog.
• Fixed problem where This PC’s + sign in the tree could disappear if you mapped and unmapped a network drive without ever properly expanding the This PC branch
• The Thumbnail and Name columns now stay together if you switch to Details+Thumbnails mode and change folders.
• Relaxed the rules about which characters can be used in the Rename dialog’s New Name field. (Colons and forward-slashes, in particular.)
• Removed delay between Find completing and the (full) results appearing in the file display.
• Improved the Reset focus entry when sorting file list option so that the file display never scrolls in reaction to a sort change when it is on. If the item with focus is scrolled out of view, focus will now be reset to the first visible item. Now, if the option is on and you scroll to the top or bottom of the file list and click a column header, you will still be at the top or bottom of the list. This option is now enabled by default. (Only affects new or reset configs. To change it in existing configs, go to Preferences / File Displays / Options.)
• Fixed an issue where, if labels were stored in Preferences rather than NTFS, multi-line commands which added / removed labels to the same file in multiple stages only really had the last line affect the file.
• If population of auto-sized file display columns causes a scrollbar to appear at the bottom of the Lister, the file display now scrolls down slightly if needed to keep the item with focus visible. (In particular, this fixes an issue where navigating to a file path, such that the parent folder is read and the file is selected, could have the file immediately covered by the scrollbar.)
• Animated Gif plugin changes:
  • Now supports selections with fixed aspect ratios.
  • Performance fix when drag-selecting images.
  • Now supports assigning Expand/Scroll Image to left double-click. This includes being able to open the expanded image when it is not being scaled down, similar to the internal viewer (only for double-clicks). (Previously, expanding was only possible when single-clicking the left or middle button.)
  • Now supports the Show VIEWERCMD = dragsel command used by advanced script add-ins for esoteric mouse button behavior.
• Blocked the File Renamer Turbo context menu extension (“shell.dll”) by default, as it crashes Opus when right-clicking files.
• Fixed crash if @hideifpath: was added to a button with no path after it.
• Scripting changes:
  • Script columns have a new timeout property which can override the default 10 second timeout before Opus gives up waiting for them in situations where calculation is blocking things from continuing (eg filters and Print/Export Folder Listing).
  • With a dual-display Lister, DOpus.Create.BusyIndicator now affects the side of the tab you give it, or uses the source tab if you give it a Lister.
  • The Command.Results object now has a NewViewers property which returns a collection of any standalone image viewers created when the command was run, similar to the existing NewListers and NewTabs properties.
  • DOpus.Viewers no longer includes viewers which are in the process of closing.
  • The Command.Results.NewListers and NewTabs lists now return the Listers and tabs in the order they were created. (The same is also true for the new NewViewers list.)