Undock/separate panels

[dregio]

It should be possible to separate the panes as independent windows, and also to join two different panes together to form one couple.

I'll explain:

In the day to day usage, when I'm not just doing file administration & organization, I'm just working.

I work in different folders. Each task I'm working on is normally related to only one folder.

A *lot* of times during the day, I suffer an interruption and need to open a different folder. I like the metaphor Explorer uses: when I'm done with that task, I just close that window and go back to whatever window was beneath it.

But in the commander, I close the tab, and then I have to think in which pane I was working. Many times -for instance after a short while of having opened the commander-, I'm only using one pane. The other is meaningless. If I close a tab, I have to think which pane was the last one I've been working with. Independent windows for the folders are a lot closer to the way I work.

Of course, having been a heavy commander user for almost 20 years now, I can recognize the benefits of having a two panes view. But now I feel a bit tired of having two panes all of the time, and the shortcomings it has.

Or think it in another way: only nerd and semi-nerd people uses two pane commanders. Why would be that? Oh, right, 'cause it's complicated to bear with two panes when they want to work with one thing at a time!

Then, let's build a new way of working: I want a single pane commander. (The width of a normal pane, that's half the normal window, as always.)

Then, during the day, I can open several windows, all of them as part of the same commander instance, of course (I hate running the same program over and over).

And only when I find myself in the need of doing some file copying or organization, I would drag one window onto the other and... Shazam! A dual-pane commander window is formed, just as we know it.

When I finish that task, I can just close one of the panes and continue to work with my lovely, simple, single pane window.

On single pane windows:
- F5 would copy the file to the same folder. As when you’re building a new version of something.
- F6 would just rename the file.
- Alt-F5 would compress the files to a zipped file in the same folder (we all do that many times, and having to display the SAME folder in both panes only to do this seems like a stupid complication!).
- Alt-F9 would decompress in the same way.


A new metaphor has to be developed. Think about the power of that.

Take this comment just as a bootstrap for better formed ideas.