What are the advanced options for favorite folders?

Two tabs of the Add/Edit Favorite Folder dialog box give more advanced options for favorite folders.

In the Windows Options tab, you can set where the Explorer window will be displayed. First, uncheck the Use default window position checkbox. Then, decide if you want to display the favorite folder in a maximized, minimized or normal Explorer window. If you choose normal, you can decide at what position and what size this window will be displayed. If your system has more than one monitor and you choose Maximized, you can select on which monitor the window will be maximized (more info about multi-monitor systems).

These window options are only available for the favorite types open with Windows Explorer (Folders, Special Folders and FTP site). For most other applications and documents, moving and resizing the window proved to be unreliable.

Open a sub folder automatically

Often, when you open a given folder, what you want, in fact, is to work in one of its sub folders. For example, let’s say you have folder for a client and, under it, sub folders for each of its orders. Most probably, you will want to work in the folder for the latest order of this client. This folder should be the one that was the most recently created.

When you open a favorite folder, you can ask QAP to automatically open the most recently created sub folder in this favorite folder. Set this option in the Advanced Settings tab. QAP could also open the most anciently created, or the most recently/anciently modified or accessed sub folder. Note about the last accessed date-time: if accessed date tracking is disabled on your system (it is disabled by default), this date-time should be the same as the last modified date-time. See how you could enable accessed date tracking on Windows 7 or 10.

Launch with another application

Normally, favorite folders are open in Windows Explorer (or Directory Opus / Total Commander if you selected one of these file managers in Options). In the Advanced Settings tab, you can tell QAP to launch the folder with another application. The designated application will be launched with the favorite folder path as parameter. This option is also available for Document, Special folders, URL and FTP favorites.

In the following example, the folder will be launched by the following batch file (saved here as C:\Users\Standard\my_batch.bat) :

c:
cd \
echo List files in %1
dir %1
pause

When launched with QAP, this folder path is passed to the target application (here, my_batch.bat) as the first command-line parameter. See the result of the execution of this batch.

Live Folders

See also, about Live Folders: Can a submenu be updated live with the content of a folder?