Today it's easter for many people, and many of you are busy contemplating the unbounded love of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ who died for our sins — or you are just busy eating chocolate bunnies <g>. At any rate you don't have time for long blog articles so here's a small and sweet one.

xplorer² like all decent file managers automatically senses when files get added, deleted or modified in the folder being browsed, and updates the folder pane almost in real time. This autorefresh feature is convenient, but in large fast changing folders it may backfire. Say you have a folder with thousands of files you've downloaded over the years, and you are downloading yet another tool or movie in there. If this folder is in some pane (even hidden) xplorer² will re-read the folder contents very frequently — each time a batch of data is written. Refreshing 10,000 files every few seconds is a recipe for disaster, and will slow things down dramatically.

In such cases salvation comes from View > Hold autorefresh menu command. You can temporarily stop xplorer² reading folder changes just in that big folder that causes the delays. Who cares to see live download details anyway? If you need a quick update you can press <Ctrl+R> to force a refresh. This will not affect any other xplorer² pane, e.g. the folder tree will keep on auto-refreshing as usual.

Talking about easter and eggs, here's one that not many people know. In the old days when I was writing 2xExplorer, I had too much free time so one day I added a hidden surprise. If you create a registry value (DWORD) called bLameMessages under the key HKCU\Software\ZabaraKatranemia Plc\2xExplorer\Right Pane Settings and set its value to 1, then 2xExplorer instead of informative error messages will show up random drivel like "This is a catastrophy of biblical proportions" or "Internal program short-circuit; this is due to a signal failure" and other amusing stuff — even mildly insulting.

So mind that easter egg! :)

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