Software Update: Directory Opus 12.27

GPSoftware has released version 12.27 of its Directory Opus file manager. This program is in a way 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. Although Directory Opus works on Windows XP and above, version 12.20 is the last where it installer still works under Windows XP† The program can 60 days being tested; after that, a license of 89 Australian dollars has to be purchased, which equates to about 55 euros. Since version 10.2, there is also a less extended version, for the equivalent of 30 euros. The changelog for this release shows the following list of changes and improvements:

The following changes were part of the 12.26.1 – 12.26.3 beta updates:

• FTP SSH now supports elliptic curve algorithms (NIST and 25519).
• The Publisher tag is now supported for FLAC and Ogg files.
• Workaround for Open With > Paint.Net not working correctly due to incorrect data in the registry.
• Fixed List and Small Icons modes not painting the bottom pixels of some icons until something triggered a repaint.
• Fixed problem with standalone viewer’s metadata panel not updating when moving to the next/previous.
• Static context menu entries added to the HKCR\* key are now shown for folders as well as files.
• Fixed F-Secure SAFE context menu not appearing.
• Double-clicking in the path field now selects whole path segments, rather than stopping on the wordbreak_char_paths characters like Ctrl-Left / Ctrl-Right does.
  • Added space to default wordbreak_char_paths so it’s now consistent with wordbreak_char_names which has space hard-coded.
  • Added slash and backslash to the default wordbreak characters for names and paths.
  • (Some things handled them by default anyway but, previously, if you pasted a full or relative path into the inline rename field, it’d treat the separators like normal letter characters and make it a pain to jump to them.)
• Fixed a crash which could occur using the Clipboard PASTE AS command with a name beginning with a[character[character
• Transparent docked toolbars now use the whole area of ​​each button for hit-testing, even before the buttons become hot, which should make them easier to use.
• Fixed items for a couple of programs appearing multiple times in context menus.
• Commands using both Set QUICKFILTER and QUICKFILTERFLAGS on the same line will now highlight as “on” provided both arguments match the current state.
• Fixed turning on Flat View not applying the Flat View folder format’s column-grouping. For example, if the file display was already grouped and you turned on Flat View (Mixed), it would stay grouped, but the menus would indicate it was not grouped. The menus were correct and the file display should have been un-grouped, assuming the default situation where the Flat View folder format is turned on and configured to turn off grouping.
• Go FOLDER CONTENT menus now work with collections where multiple items have the same name.
• Fixed crash that could sometimes occur if you held the F5 key down to repeatedly refresh the This PC folder.
• Made a change to hopefully fix incorrect timestamps on SFTP servers.
• The recently added option to choose whether to display folder icons or lightbulb (Opus logo) icons is now set to lightbulbs by default. If you want to use folder icons you can select this from Preferences / Display / Options / Use current folder’s icon.
• Cosmetic fixes/improvements for borders around a few controls on Windows 11.
• Fix for very slow handling of some Photoshop PSD files due to extreme metadata bloat in the form of Adobe’s document history tracking.
• Text and TextThumbs plugins now ignore files that start with the PaintDotNet signature, so they can be displayed via its thumbnail handler instead. (Most data at the start of PDN’s file format is text, so they looked like text files to both plugins.)
• Fixed problem with automatic path completion in the location field with aliases beginning with a . character.
• Fix for using Windows Search below mount points.
• Scripting DOpus.Create.Blob(“test”) with no encoding specified creates a UTF16 string again, as per the documentation.
• Troubleshooting setting context_menu_debug now logs more information.
• Blocked Daemon Tools shell extensions by default. See Shell extensions which are blocked by default 1 if you wish to re-enable them, but keep in mind they have caused crashes for several people.
• The GetNewNameData script object (passed to the OnGetNewName method) has a new preview property, which returns true when the method is being called to generate the preview in the Rename dialog, and false when it’s renaming the file for real.
• Fixed issue with case-insensitive search for Cyrillic text.
• Fix for Set TABPOSITION=below being able to push things below the file display out of the window frame until the window was resized.

The following changes are new for 12.27:

• Improved file context menu de-duplication. While building the menus, some registry keys were processed more than once. Menus should now open a little faster. This also fixes the problem introduced in 12.26.2 beta where a single item added via the File Types dialog could appear in the menu more than once.
• Fixed bug introduced in 12.23 where the Viewer Pane / Display Shell Icons checkbox did nothing and the adjacent Display Shell Thumbnails checkbox controlled both settings.