Yokemate of Keyboards
Posts: 2115 from 2003/2/24
From: po-RNO
Quote:KennyR wrote:
Quote:Andreas_Wolf wrote:
> When I migrated to MorphOS, DOpus was the thing I missed most.
Fortunately, it was always possible to
use it with MorphOS.
It works, but without the ability to show MorphOS PNG icons, and being more or less forced to run in its own screen, it might as well have not.
No, you're not forced to run it on its own sceen, it works just fine on the Ambient screen too. Just set DOpus Display settings as "Workbench:Use" and it runs on the Ambient screen. Then you can do some small fine-tuning to integrate it better there. Disable the backdrop option to be able to resize the DOopus main window and reveal the Ambient underneath, then you can even hide the whole DOpus main window and use one of the two programs there is to open DOpus listers by clicking the Ambient desktop.
I have configured my system to open Ambient listers by doubleclicking the left button on the Ambient desktop and to open DOpus listers by middle clicking the desktop. Then I can easily decide which lister I want to open whenever I want. DOpus acts practically the same way as it'd be run as WB replacement, but you get the best of both Ambient and DOpus at the same time. If you want to browse icons, use Ambient, but if you want to use the powerful functionality in DOpus and use its listers in name modes, feel free, it's there available all the time.
I also use DOpus startmenus to launch programs, I don't use Ambient panels for that at all. Here you can see my DOpus startmenu in use at the lower left corner:
jPV_MOS2_2008-08.png. And I have configured global hotkeys for the whole MorphOS usage from DOpus Hotkeys settings, it's much better than Ambient's own hotkeys which need Ambient being active when used. DOpus hotkeys do work everywhere on any screen. And DOpus scripts are nice and can work in the background even if you don't have any DOpus windows open... you can, for example, configure certain actions when a new disk (CD, USB, whatever) is inserted.. an icon appears on the Ambient desktop, but DOpus does the things you want then.
So, it can be integrated very well with the Ambient, and I actually like it this way even better than being WB replacement alone, because now you can get the best from both programs in the same environment. I usually use listers in the name mode, and rarely need icons, so I can very well do the icons from Ambient if needed and non-working PNG icons isn't such an issue. I also have a button in DOpus listers to open the current directory in a new Ambient window in the icon mode, I don't need to browse twice anywhere if I want to swtich between DOpus and Ambient listers.
The only thing you really lose in this solution compared to the full WB replacement is the custom placement and grouping of desktop icons, but I don't count that as too important feature myself.
Quote:
DOpus was integrated tightly with Workbench. It could close when workbench did. You could drag files from Workbench to DOpus and vice versa. You could drag files from DOpus to a shell window. You couldn't do any of these on MorphOS*, so it was relegated to a sort of DOpus4-alike. I tried using it for a while, then went back to Ambient on its own. I don't run two file managers.
No, not true. As said above, DOpus can be integrated pretty tightly to Ambient/MorphOS too. When you run it on the Ambient screen you can copy files by dragging them from an Ambient window to DOpus lister (although not vice versa), I use this when I browse some archive or image files on Ambient that I haven't bothered to configure to DOpus. You can drag files from DOpus to a shell window under MorphOS too, no problem with that. You don't have to use it like DOpus4 at all, if you don't want.
Quote:
(* DOpus installed a patch in workbench.library. While this still worked in MorphOS1.x, it seemed to break for me in later versions and cause bad instability.)
Hmm? I haven't been aware of anything like this. For me MorphOS 2.x was an improvement and made DOpus to work better compared to 1.x. Font requester hanged on MorphOS 1.x and "Mouse buttons over inactive banks" caused some issues, but they both are working fine since MorphOS 2.0 now. I haven't come up anything else regarding that, and I've been using DOpus daily under MorphOS for all these 15 years. Still do most of the work with DOpus listers rather than Ambient listers.