Plugin management improvements
Posted: 2012-08-05, 18:27 UTC
Total Commander, besides being a great file manager, offers great flexibility with its plugins.
Unfortunately, the usability of the current Plugin management is poor. You can barely change or edit the installed plugins, the information provided is bare metal.
For a TC beginner, it's absolutely not intuitive at all. The advanced users don't even use the graphical plugin management but edit the plugin sections in the ini file(s).
Alexey Torgashin created a much better alternative with TC Plugins Manager which unfortunately only seems available as 32 Bit edition.
While being helpful, I wish for a real usable plugin management within Total Commander.
First of all, a real table view instead of a listbox would give a much better overview, with all the advantages a table offers: sorting (filesystem/packer), multiple attributes, grid, column (auto)sizing. Allow to select multiple entries.
Suggested columns for all plugin management dialogs: Plugin Icon, Plugin Name, Version, Update, x32/x64, path+filename, website link, author, description.
I know some of the attributes aren't available yet, but a rework of the plugin package system should provide those and more. I made suggestion for that here.
Offer an additional button to make selected plugin paths relative to Total Commander's location, using %COMMANDER_PATH% as substitution.
Offer a button "Check for updates" which checks the update location provided by every (future) plugin for new versions and displays the new version number in the "update" table column. If no update is available, display "current", if an update check failed, display "failed", if the plugin doesn't offer the necessary update location, display "not available".
Clicking on an available updated plugin version offers the automatic download and installation of the updated plugin archive.
Offer a "Details" button to display an about box, giving further details and full length description about the plugin.
Offer a "Enabled/Disable" button to well, enable and disable selected plugins
Packer plugins:
Offer a separate configuration dialog when double clicking (or the edit button) a plugin in the table. Display a listbox with all associated extensions. Have buttons for remove/add/change. Display the flags/packer capabilities next to the listbox using checkboxes, so each extension can be configured separately without much clicking. Have a checkbox "Customize" on top of the capabilities list which is unchecked by default, so the capabilities list is greyed out, but showing the default selected capabilities for this extension/plugin.
Filesystem plugins:
Offer renaming function in the table cell/as separate button.
Lister plugins:
Offer drag&drop sorting of the table items in addition to the up/down buttons.
Edit/Double click an item gives a separate dialog to modify the plugin triggers with either a help button for the available triggers or already integrated into the dialog.
Content plugins:
Same as lister plugins.
Comments, improvements, ranting are very welcome
Unfortunately, the usability of the current Plugin management is poor. You can barely change or edit the installed plugins, the information provided is bare metal.
For a TC beginner, it's absolutely not intuitive at all. The advanced users don't even use the graphical plugin management but edit the plugin sections in the ini file(s).
Alexey Torgashin created a much better alternative with TC Plugins Manager which unfortunately only seems available as 32 Bit edition.
While being helpful, I wish for a real usable plugin management within Total Commander.
First of all, a real table view instead of a listbox would give a much better overview, with all the advantages a table offers: sorting (filesystem/packer), multiple attributes, grid, column (auto)sizing. Allow to select multiple entries.
Suggested columns for all plugin management dialogs: Plugin Icon, Plugin Name, Version, Update, x32/x64, path+filename, website link, author, description.
I know some of the attributes aren't available yet, but a rework of the plugin package system should provide those and more. I made suggestion for that here.
Offer an additional button to make selected plugin paths relative to Total Commander's location, using %COMMANDER_PATH% as substitution.
Offer a button "Check for updates" which checks the update location provided by every (future) plugin for new versions and displays the new version number in the "update" table column. If no update is available, display "current", if an update check failed, display "failed", if the plugin doesn't offer the necessary update location, display "not available".
Clicking on an available updated plugin version offers the automatic download and installation of the updated plugin archive.
Offer a "Details" button to display an about box, giving further details and full length description about the plugin.
Offer a "Enabled/Disable" button to well, enable and disable selected plugins
Packer plugins:
Offer a separate configuration dialog when double clicking (or the edit button) a plugin in the table. Display a listbox with all associated extensions. Have buttons for remove/add/change. Display the flags/packer capabilities next to the listbox using checkboxes, so each extension can be configured separately without much clicking. Have a checkbox "Customize" on top of the capabilities list which is unchecked by default, so the capabilities list is greyed out, but showing the default selected capabilities for this extension/plugin.
Filesystem plugins:
Offer renaming function in the table cell/as separate button.
Lister plugins:
Offer drag&drop sorting of the table items in addition to the up/down buttons.
Edit/Double click an item gives a separate dialog to modify the plugin triggers with either a help button for the available triggers or already integrated into the dialog.
Content plugins:
Same as lister plugins.
Comments, improvements, ranting are very welcome
