Listary 5 Beta (5.00.2334)

I understand that this is not a simple thing.
Considering work profiles: Most of my time I work as someone who needs to deal with xls, doc, vsd, ppt and similar type of files. But there are also times where I quickly need to edit an .ini file that is in a location which is outside the other work profile (I would have chosen the hosts file as an example, but Listary already has a nice shortcut to edit that file :slight_smile: ).
How would we make sure that the user always gets the right files first in the search result?
Not simple, as I said.

Thank you very much for the detailed information.

I think the following improvements will solve a large part of your problem:

  1. Results from specific folders (e.g. My Documents, OneDrive, Dropbox, etc.) or with specific extensions (e.g. doc, xls, ppt) are given a higher priority than others. They are more likely to be shown at the top of the results list.
  2. Results from specific folders (e.g. Program Files, ProgramData, AppData) are given a lower priority than others. Normally they will be shown at the bottom of the results list and you won’t see them.

These two rules will only improve the sort order, they don’t exclude any file from results. So if occasionally you want to search for an .ini file, you will still get it, but maybe you need to type .ini explicitly to make it shown before other results.

We can’t, but we can make it right for the most common cases, and make it easy to fix for cases we can’t handle. If you need to search for documents 90% of the time, I think it’s fine to show documents from specific folders at the top of all results. When you want to search for other files occasionally, you can still get them easily by giving more search hints (e.g. type a longer keyword or type the file extension) if there are too many disturbing results.

I’ll try to make the name label auto-scroll when you select a search result (the path label already does this). Currently you may try to improve the toolbar width a little in Listary Options - Appearance - Options -Width.

I am a long time user of Listary Pro and I have never had any issues with it but…
I am using this version and it doesn’t work correctly for me:

  • many applications do not show Listary toolbar in Open/Save dialogs (i.e. Chrome, Opera).
  • there are no Total Commander menus at all
  • Listary do not react on directories changes in TC,
  • Listary do not show TC’s paths in Currently Opened folder.

System specifics: two different machines with Win7 x64.
Note: Listary Beta crashed when it was first started after installation and system reboot on both PCs.

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Thanks for your feedback. Unfortunately I can’t reproduce these bugs.

  1. Does Listary still have these bugs after reboot?
  2. Are you running Listary as administrator?

Hey man, long time user here, thanks for the update!

Just updated to this beta and although it looks nice, there are some issues (I upgraded yesterday, but I had to wait for a reboot to make sure that’s not the problem). So:

  • Set input focus to file list settings? Not working anymore;
  • like @Dan mentioned above, finding is not very intuitive. It’s surely not sort by date nor relevance
    • Find as you type doesn’t work. At all. It should match the folders that are in current window first (either if the current folder is indexed or not) then should search on the full index;
    • I guess is fuzzy’s fault here, but this should match the topmost folder (1, in this case);
  • When you double press CTRL to show the first instance of Listary, it will hide on focus lost. If you press CTRL again (to show the launcher), the box will not be hidden on focus lost (and it should be gone);
  • Clicking on favorites folders do exactly nothing.
  • Launch Apps doesn’t really work for other apps than Windows Store (e.g. I would like to launch any app that’s on my start screen). I’m not sure if this was working or was even present on previous version.

That’s all for now.

About my setup:

  • Windows 10 x64;

  • First of all, my index consist in few folders (with a lot of files & directories);

  • With the previous version of Listary things were fine.

Thanks for your feedback.

Listary only changes input focus to the file list on Windows XP because on XP the default focus is the folder tree. On Windows 10, the default focus is already the file list and Listary does nothing. It seems another application prevents Explorer from setting the focus correctly.

Same here. Something prevents Listary from attaching to the Explorer instance correctly. I can see that you have some extensions installed for Explorer from the screenshots. What are they? Can you disable them temporarily, reboot and then try again?

I’ll optimize this.

This is a change by design. There will be an option for this soon.

Launch App search folders (e.g. start menu, desktop) must be indexed.

I checked your screenshots again. Is it a second panel created by QTTabBar? If so, Listary (both 4 & 5) can’t support it yet because it’s actually a third-party file manager (which looks like Explorer very much) embedded in Explorer, but not a real Explorer instance.

The toolbar is StExBar. It doesn’t affect any functionality, it’s merely a launcher of apps. I’ll disable it later and post a note if anything changes.

(although this shouldn’t be a big of a deal because W10 do a pretty good job at indexing apps).

Btw, the issues i reported are present only on Listary 5, on previous version everything was good.

I just tested it, and both Listary 4 and 5 worked perfectly with StExBar installed. So it should not be the cause.

The most possible reason now is that some files of Listary are not updated successfully. Please reinstall Listary 5 and make sure to reboot if prompted.

Sorry I mean the folders listed in Listary Options - Launch Apps (i.e. the actual paths presented by %start_menu%, %desktop%) must be indexed in Listary Options - Index. If you’ve removed the entire C:\ drive from index, you need to add these folders manually. Do not make any changes in Listary Options - Launch Apps.

Listary allows you to type much fewer keys to launch an app than Windows 10.

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Uninstalled, rebooted, reinstalled, the following are fixed:

  • Set input focus to file list settings
  • find as you type
  • clicking on favorites

Which for me is enough for now, since it works like before :smiley:

Thanks!

Btw, a crazy idea: when launching apps, allow passing params. E.g. doing cmd dir /B should pass dir /B to the cmd.

I’m glad it works now!

Thanks for the suggestion. I’ll implement this for the cmd command first. Support for all apps may be added in a future version.

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Great news! I added the start menu on the index and it also works for launching apps! Yay!

PS: I think you should use Launch Apps Search Folders to index applications, no matter what’s inside the Index Section (eventually add an option to force this indexing and leave it on by default).

If those questions are for me… restarting changes nothing. TC and Listary are always run as admin.

Having trouble working with commands. Not sure how to properly escape or if you could improve this.
For example.

cmd.exe
arguments:
/C for /r %f in (*) do @copy “%f” .

First, I’d like to ensure i don’t have to ESCAPE extra quotes more than I would if I was writing a native batch or powershell script. Making me write escaped characters to quote the arguments makes it very complicated to troubleshoot on a users end.

Secondly, I’d like my “command” to offer a multiline text box, so I could edit a batch or powershell script with mutiple lines. This would allow Listary to offer a powerful option for script launching.

This would then allow the user to “set current location to %Path%” and proceed with the execution of the script.

May I ask why you changed the index settings? For performance reasons or because there are so many unwanted search results?

If Listary doesn’t work on all 32-bit applications (Chrome, Opera, TC), then it was not updated successfully. Please uninstall Listary, reboot, and then reinstall it.

You don’t need to do any extra escaping. You can simply copy and paste the arguments that work in a Win+R Run box.

You mean run multiple commands in one call? This looks more like the extension feature that would come in a future version of Listary. Currently you have to save all the commands to a .bat or .ps file and call that file in Listary.

Since Listary relies primarily on the windows Start Menu’s for locating links to executable files, please add support for operating on the TARGET of Windows .LNK files in addition to the .LNK shortcut file itself. For example, I hit CTRL+SPACE and search for Notepad++ and I think most of the options that most of us want most of the time will be in fact related to the TARGET of the .LNK rather than the .LNK itself.

In fact, I would even argue that the target of the link should be the object selected by Listary by default, and the special case would be operating on the .LNK file itself via an extra menu (perhaps something like “Edit Shortcut Directly”) as the first item in the action list.

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This one is already on my to-do.