petermad wrote: 2020-06-07, 12:12 UTC
Interesting that you apparantly are running 32-bit Windows !0 - rare.
Thank you for being so kind and patient with me, Peter. Since you seem to show so much interest, let me tell you a little story. If it's too philosophical or political just ignore it and move on to the next section, but I thought it would help you understand where I come from and why I seem so adamant in my requirements.
Yes, indeed, I'm long overdue for an operating system bitness upgrade. In fact, for a complete paradigm shift, of which I hope to see Total Commander or another Orthodox File Manager becoming the central part, in other words, of a File Manager based Operating System.
I come from the DOS (Disk Operating System) User Family. Although I discovered computers programming in FORTRAN on punch cards on a multi-user system back in the 70s, and the first PC I used was the TRS-80, with its primitive cassette based storage system, I later moved on to CP/M and, finally, to DOS when I discovered the File Manager that truly revolutionized computing for me, DOS Shell, which brought computing from its linear command line origin to the two dimensional world of the Graphical User interface and its synergistic interconnectivity.
Over the years I have seen with great dismay this amazing system, where users had total control over their computing, which held so much promise at the dawn of the Personal Computer Revolution, being taken away from people and taken over by large corporations, first by the 'desktop' user interface isolation layer aimed to 'guide' users into more efficient work to suit the corporate model of the world society was slowly moving towards, instead of the freedom of total control of the file system of old. And now, with the 'tile' interface, uses have become mere data producers and consumers connected into system more akin to The Matrix than human betterment that Star Trek promised.
In practical terms, we have gone from a Disk Operating System where File Management was under total control by the user, to a system where users aren't even supposed to know where their stuff is outside of the confines of Google, Facebook and other major corporations only separated from total appropriation buy the ever so tenuous safeguard that is the password and online connectivity.
To me, my computer is not a pod in some giant stalk on a farm like in the Matrix, where Freedom is tightly constrained by a framework out of which discourse isn't allowed, but rather a vast open shop with shelves along the walls and a large open area near the center with one or several projects going on, situated a lot at the fringe of a city surrounded by fields and forests, connected to a main highway by a wide driveway.
***
Now that I've explained the philosophy behind it and my interest In TC (I've actually dabbled with it on and off for years until I had no choice but to move away from my trusty Norton File Manager), let me delve a little bit more why I stayed for so long with a 32-bit OS: my best applications are 16-bit, I've built extensive libraries for them and they have unfortunately been long abandoned. But I've kept using them and still use them to this day, in particular TopDraw, a program that does everything Adobe Illustrator does, but with 1000 times less hard drive space, memory and CPU power, and that, to this day, has no equal.
Another, more personal and moral reason for this long overdue change is the necessity to protect history, without which one cannot learn from and become a better person. Old applications are for me a lot like like antique furniture or, better yet, antique tools and kitchen appliances with their amazing abilities many of which we have forgotten the use of.
Because these wonderful apps or some of their dependencies were written for 16-bit and were abandoned afterwards, you can see why I had to stay for so long with a 32 bit OS - Until, that is, after having dabbled with Virtual Box and then more seriously with Virtual PC for many years but without definite success, I discovered, quite recently, the one that actually worked completely seamlessly with my applications and hardware: VMWare.
Add to this my life-long project to be completely free from the Tyranny of the Operating System that Software Installation is, locking users into one machine and one platform, and recently succeeding into transforming all of my applications to Portable Mode, essentially converting the proverbial 'MCP' back to what it was supposed to be only doing, managing hardware, and you can perhaps now better understand why it is so important to me to have a File Manager that gives me total control over my machine and does exactly what I need.
In practical terms, what I'm basically trying to achieve is a File Management System consisting of a Tree, to Situate Myself within my File System on one side, a List of folders and files on the other with their specifiers: name, size, date, attribute (version history would be nice to have if that existed), and, last but not least, an upper level drive bar at the top, distinct from the tree. And that, on two side-by-side panels, to allow efficient File Management, consisting essentially of Renaming, Organizing into Folders, Moving, Copying, a Differential File Versioning System (a long dream of mine that to my knowledge never came to pass) and Synchronizing and Search (Discovering Everything has been nothing short of a Revelation to me). The left panel would be used for the Work Drive and, on the other, another for a Backup Drive, an external Archive Medium (such as a CD or DVD) or a transport device for quick delivery to other machines (such as USB key or other portable drive).
At this particular point in time, I have managed to work around TC's idiosyncrasies of having the whole world including the dirty kitchen sink in the tree, when changing drives, by collapsing the whole tree to nothing except for the 'desktop' (which, by the way, as a metaphor, means absolutely NOTHING to me, as its real location is fairly deep within the file system and changing from OS version to OS version, being, on my present OS, located at C:\user\username\desktop), then expanding, in the tree, ONLY the drive I selected on the drive bar with its list of first level folders. But if there was a way to only show the tree for the selected drive all my problems would be solved, because otherwise why would one need the drive bar for, if not for being the tree of drives?
Well, I hope this clears things up a bit. Sorry for the long ramble, but I think I couldn't have explained my reasons without it, where I'm coming from and why it's so important to me.
As for your other questions:
petermad wrote: 2020-06-07, 12:12 UTC
The question is: would you be satisfied if in the example drive G. is scrolled to the top, or do you also expect the drive C: part of the tree to be collapsed?
That answer should be obvious if you read the rest of this long post - I'd much prefer the tree to be limited to the drive I selected - the drive bar IS the drive tree to me. Which doesn't mean that switching drives shouldn't reactivate the previously opened path (like in DOS), although it would be nice if this was optional.
petermad wrote: 2020-06-07, 12:12 UTCYou could try to set AlwaysToRoot=1 in the [Configuration] section of your wincmd.ini file - then at least the the root of the current drive in the tree will always be highlighted when you change drive with the drive buttons.
It's already setup this way
Again, thank you for your patience, thank you for listening and thank you for your generous help
which, after a while, becomes mightily confusing 
