Multi-panel plug-in for FAR Manager, Read me first

PURPOSE

File and archive manager (FAR Manager) allows to have up to two current
directories (or /locations/, in general) quickly accessed via its panels.
The limit of two comes from the maximum number of simultaneous panels on
the screen in FAR Manager, which is a design restriction. The two-panel
design is one of the ways to naturally represent the concept of source
and target directory for some operations on files. At the same time, this
approach might be considered harmful, when used as a limitation for the
number of current locations. It is often found restrictive for the active,
fast-paced, fluent work, when the advanced user has to switch often between
a set of current directories, representing his current work ring. Multi-
panel plugin enables a more convenient style of working, by providing a way
to quickly and easily, within every single panel, access multiple panels,
containing full-fledged current locations, sorted in the least-recently-used
order. Important, that this makes it unnecessary to increase the number of
simultaneously displayed panels on the screen, and even quite opposite,
this need can often be reduced to a single panel, actually containing
multiple panels inside.

CONCEPT

The idea of multiple panels has already been implemented several times in
various file managers. The most commonly seen solution is switching between
*pairs* of file panels. This means that every two file panels are rigidly
linked together, and can only exist together. This approach not only forces
to have duplicate locations open on several panel pairs, but also has obvious
limitations for the experienced user. It makes it excessively hard to quickly
search for the desired location combination among the opened pairs, and hard
to create new location combinations by constructing new pairs from the
already opened pairs.

In contrast with the older approaches, Multi-panel introduces another strategy.
Each *one* panel behaves completely independently - can be switched to, cloned,
closed, etc. Additionally, all the panels are linked into a single list,
ordered in the least-recently-used order, which makes it even more easy to
combine and recombine desired location pairs on-the-fly!

Providing convenient and quick access to operations on locations is the whole
reason behind multiple panels.

LIMITATIONS

The support for other plugin's panels is not seriously considered in
Multi-panel right now, because FAR itself officially does not work with the
plugin panels very well. Anyway, this is not considered a serious limitation
right now, because not only the FAR API is not powerful enough at this point,
but even some native functions of FAR do not work well with plugin panels,
for example, one cannot use Folder history or Folder shortcuts even with
some standard plugins.

The "quick" dialog mode in the plugin currently works starting with Win2k.
In the previous Windows version the panel list dialog works only in the
"normal" mode. Supposedly, there is a problem in the OS, preventing the
keyboard code from working properly. Taking into consideration the fact
that the "quick" dialog mode has been reported by the users as extremely
convenient, there is a possibility that in the future it will be specially
implemented in the plugin for older Windows versions too.

EDITOR/VIEWER

At the same time, FAR Manager allows having multiple internal editor and
internal viewer screens opened. But there are only trivial ways of switching
between them available by default: quick cycling through screens in a fixed
order, quick direct switching to a numbered screen, and direct switching via
the screen list popup. In the future, Multi-panel might extend its powerful
location switching function to the opened internal editor and viewer screens
too, transparently unifying them with the file panels.
