FreeCommander Forum

First off thanks for the application, I'm just getting to grips with it and it looks like its going to be replacing explorer on my system.

There is just one suggestion that I'd like to make and this effects how you calculate the file size for folders. I like to see folder sizes, so I have the calculate folder size button toggled to permanently on.

At the moment your doing a live scan of the folders every time you change a directory, This has the negative effect of having no folder sizes being listed when ever you navigate into that directory.

It also means that if you return to a folder you've just visited it has to re-calculate everything all over again. If you regularly browse to and from the C: drive, or My Documents as I tend to do this causes a lot of disk activity.

What I suggest is that you keep track of each folder's size in a database, that way when ever we change directory you could instantly pick up the last known size for the directory.

You could also check the last known time of access to determine if you need to perform another full scan of that folder, or if you just want to present the cached results to the user, e.g. if its within 60 seconds of the last update just show the cached version. You could even present the timeout period as a user configurable option so that they can configure it to suit their needs.

When you are displaying the historic folder size you could represent this figure with a different background-foreground colour combination, or have some character appended/pre-pended to the size e.g. ~ to show that the results are awaiting an update.

Hope you consider this as a possible addition to your application.

How would you realize this with network folder, removable drives, cd-roms etc. ?
So for me, it does not really make sense ?
Maybe this is an alternative ?
http://foldersize.sourceforge.net/
It installs a service on your computer, which tracks the foldersizes.
I dont know if you can embedd the column ?

Regards
Thorsten

What I suggest is that you keep track of each folder's size in a database, that way when ever we change directory you could instantly pick up the last known size for the directory

This might be a good idea. Perhaps, though, instead of caching the sizes of every fiolder, FC could store those most recently and/or frequently viewed.

Also, perhaps instead of recalculating based on the age of the cached item (which requires a date to be stored for each folder as well) FC could simply use the old value, and update the displayed values in the background, giving preference to those with focus of the mouse or those selected. That would smartly conserve processing power for what the user really wanted to look at, rather than what the user might want to look at.

Of course, the user would have to be aware and beware of the fact that the sizes were not quite accurate, and purposefully select a folder to get the real size. This might be a sort of lose-lose compromise between not checking the size and checking the size of every folder.