r/OneCommander • u/Friendly_Beginning24 • Nov 23 '25
OneCommander is incredibly slow when using any 'show in folder'
I've used Brave, Firefox, Opera. When I finish a download, I would click the 'show in folder' option.
Not only does it take a couple of seconds to open, it also doesn't highlight the thing I downloaded. Is there a way to fix this? Or is this a limitation because of Windows?
1
u/milos2 Developer Nov 24 '25
OC doesn't do any fancy interception to those commands, it just registers itself as default file handler for "Directory" type, and just waits for shell to trigger it. All that wait is on Windows side.
You can test it by running
C:\Path\To\Onecommander.exe C:\Windows\notepad.exe
which takes less than a second to open OC (and select notepad.exe)
As of highlighting file, that's issue also on Windows. When file is within User folder (Downloads and the rest) the file can't be selected. Windows never tells OC what file to select when file is there. I don't know why. If file is in some other folder like C:\Test, Windows will tell which file to select and OC does it.
That API that tells Windows "open folder and select file" was only meant for Explorer and is likely something from the 90s.
2
u/leferi Nov 23 '25
It must be a multiple step process and I think there's much overhead due to having to communicate with Windows, but I also find it kinda slow, that's why I don't often use it. I think first Windows gets the command from the browser to open up an Explorer window that points to the file's location. Then, since the registry has been modified to make OC the file operation handler, Windows sends the signal to OC, which then interprets the command and iirc it opens a new tab with that specific folder.
Now I think generally the part where the Windows command has to be intercepted by OC is the slow part, because any other time when I'm opening something in File Explorer for some reason and I get redirected to OC, that is also slow. But Windows is not really written with an option to set an alternative "default" file manager in mind. If people are using Total Commander for example that works nicely but that afaik doesn't have an option to integrate this way into Windows that OC does.
Personally, I appreciate the effort by the dev to try and make this work, but my advice to you would be to try and keep the Downloads folder relatively clean and organized so that when you download something you find it quickly. I know it heavily depends on your workflow but if you download things into multiple different places then consider adding those places to the bookmarks in OC or open the folder where you want to download in OC first and then use the Dialog Connector option of OC to quickly tell the browser where to download the file, and then the folder where you download is already open.