Directory Opus – King of the Dual Panes | Hacker News Reader

Directory Opus – King of the Dual Panes

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63 pointsnickt27 comments

For many years, DO was my only explorer. It was perfect in every way.

Then XYplorer [1] offered a pro license freebee (looks like back in 2019 [2]) and I gave it a try. I'm still using that same version (15.90) from so many years ago. Never looked back.

[1] https://www.xyplorer.com/

[2] https://www.xyplorer.com/freezer.php

I'm also more familiar with the excellent XYplorer.

I could not find any in depth comparison with Directory Opus. These two have accumulated so much features over the years, it became a kind of expertise to know them in detail.

The chance of a dual-expert willing to clearly expand on his experience is small. I wish more tech journalism was on this level. Instead, the verge had (at least) 4 articles in 2022 on windows explorer getting... tabs.

Disclaimer: Last I checked was over 10 years ago, so it’s very possible this information is wrong by now.

It doesn’t support dual tree + dual pane (so two explorer trees location synced to their respective pane), by far my favorite DO view.

Locked folders allowing changes. I have some frequently used folders as tabs, and set them to "locked, allow changes", which makes it, so they behave like normal tabs, but once I switch tabs, they revert to their base directory again.

I love XYplorer!

And to this day it's still written in VB6. :-)

https://www.xyplorer.com/faq-topic.php?id=VB6

I wrote a Linux filemanager very heavily inspired by DOpus way back, it's called "gentoo" [1] but I don't think it has a site online which is silly. It's a bit old, but quite configurable and I believe it's still in a few distro package repos.

[1] Yes I was and am aware of the name collision with the distro. We exchanged emails and it was cool.

Personally I never really got into dual-pane Directory Opus but Directory Opus 5 sure was a fabulous total replacement for Workbench, I think I used that from the time I got it until I finally left my Amiga for a Mac. Ever since moving to OSX my Macs have mostly run in column view.

I wonder how lost I would be if I still had my A1200 and could turn it on to try and poke at my personalized DOpus5 setup. It's been a little more than twenty years; what was once muscle memory is probably just vague hints of "this used to be a thing I did".

Actually DOpus was the only dual pane Filemanager (maybe with the exception of Ghostcommander on android lately) I actually got used to and was really fond of. I still wonder how working with floppy disks (two drives and a 4MB ram extension in my case) was so smooth in my memory.

I'm a huge fan of DOpus on Windows. Double Commander is the closest I've found for Linux (it has gtk and qt5 versions for Gnome and KDE).

I would love it if modern apps were this configurable, catering to wide flexibility and putting the user in control, rather than focusing nearly exclusively on the developer's personal design aesthetic du jour.

Closest thing we have in the Linux world right now is KDE but even there I still come across things I wish were more configurable. Much of the time, I find someone else has made the same request but the devs turn it down with, "nah, that will just confuse new users."

Directory Opus is probably the main reason why Windows remains my primary platform. There's just nothing out there that compares, particularly not on Linux.

> Directory Opus is probably the main reason why Windows remains my primary platform.

I'd love to hear your reasons for why Directory Opus is so good.

I'm a Linux/MacOS/Windows (mostly Linux) user who lives exclusively in the command line for all my file management.

I find it far more comfortable. Dual explorer dual pane is the most efficient way to handle files, for me.

But for what (I'm sincerely asking, no sarcasm)? Do you have to do file management/organization a lot? Or is it more just a tool you pop open when you actually have to manage files?

Mostly just every day stuff. But when something special does come up, something like the virtual collection feature of the search comes in handy.

All of the pre GTK+/Qt X11 apps are highly configurable via X resources. The new kids came along and ruined what was a consistent system for managing settings.

I loved directory opus so much on the Amiga that I eventuelly wrote not one but three variants of it for Linux, albeit much simpler. The latest one I still use and maintain and you're welcome to try it at https://github.com/suncore/dflynav

I used to use Directory Opus when I had an Amiga. :-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directory_Opus

Always cool to see DOpus mentioned. I've never tried it and don't plan to(Windows only and expensive) but it's rare to see a GUI app with quite that level of devoted following.

Been a customer since 2005, Version 8 back then, they are now on version 12. Considering that they only charge for major versions, that’s pretty impressive.

It’s in my personal top 3 of must-have windows software (together with EmEditor and MediaMonkey)

For those who are fans of DOpus but don't want to use Windows or pull out an Amiga, I've found Worker [1] on Linux to be an excellent substitute. You may have to compile it yourself, but I switched to it years ago and haven't looked back since.

[1] http://www.boomerangsworld.de/worker/

Midnight Commander, I love it so much. It's easy to use, have nice command history, and for some reason I got into habit of using ESC+NUM instead of F-buttons(any ideas why, I myself don't remember why).

I wonder about the financials on something like DOPUS. They've always been high quality, never bloated, easy on the license. Is that actually a valid businessmodel?

I really enjoyed using Opus over the years. (early to late 90s on various Amigas)

I used it more than the Workbench stuff as it made administration quite easy.

"DOpus" was great, though I preferred DirWork, a much lighter ditto which still ticked pretty much all of the boxes for me.

Directory Opus is the perfect example of an ultra-high-quality Windows application. I love it.

DirOpus is always the one thing I miss when I use Linux or Mac. Just a fantastic tool.

Looks like worker [1] is an actively developed clone, that very much looks like the original (haven't tried it yet).

[1] http://www.boomerangsworld.de/cms/worker/index.html

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