Community

I have set a Startup folder in Preferences, but the Explorer pane always starts pointing to the user Desktop folder rather than my custom Startup folder when I open TextPad (v8.9.0).

I don't use the Explorer pane myself, but I just tried it and mine always opens C:Windows when I start TextPad (also v8.9.0).

Is it a shortcut on the desktop with which you start TextPad? Because such shortcuts also have a "working folder" in their settings, unbound to TextPad. Set a path in there and see if that changes anything.

@amigojack: I tried the shortcut "Start In" and that worked -- thanks.

Because that folder is so many levels deep in the drive tree hierarchy, that pane now needs to be very wide to show the files in it. It would be a cool feature to be able to specify a folder for Explorer pane and have it display that folder as top level and only what's beneath it. That would narrow down the display quite a bit in cases like mine where the folder I want to use is 5 or 6 levels deep.

Right now, to keep the files in that folder in view within the pane, that side pane has to be about 20% of the screen width, which kind of eats into my coding space

I just opened a file in TP from FileZilla while making some changes, but then the Explorer pane opens to the FileZilla folder.

It would be great if the app had setting (either Preferences/Folders/Startup or a separate setting just for this pane) that could override this behavior and always show a specified folder in this pane. I think it would be more useful to most developers than defaulting to the current directory.

That should literally be Configure > Preferences > General > Working folder follows active document - untick that checkbox.

Thanks. I had that box checked so I unchecked it, saved preferences, closed TP, went back into FileZilla and opened a file from there, but the Explorer still starts with the FileZilla directory highlighted.

Please try closing the Explorer pane and then change the destination folder for the Startup folder in Configure/Preferences/Folders to somewhere else. Click Apply and then change it back to the required destination. Click Apply/OK and then exit from TextPad. Restart and open the Explorer pane. This worked for us.

I performed the steps above and now when I start TP, the Explorer panel opens to one level above the specified folder. That is, if I have the Startup folder set to: c:/temp/source/perl, then the Explorer panel opens with c:/temp/source selected (highlighted) in the tree. I can't see the "perl" folder at this point because the "source" folder is not expanded in the tree.

However, opening TP by double-clicking a specific file from within FileZilla, the Explorer opens to the FileZilla folder instead.

If I open TP from a pinned taskbar shortcut (using StartAllBack for Windows 11 as my taskbar/start menu), it opens TP with Explorer pointing to Windows/System32.

Note: In the desktop shortcut's Start In field, I currently have c:/temp/source/perl. After the above changes, if I remove the Start In field in the shortcut and open TP from the shortcut, the Explorer pane starts up pointing to my Users->Desktop folder.

PS: I used forward slashes in this post when showing examples of directory paths because the backslash characters were being removed or interpolated somehow. I tried escaping them with double backslashes but it didn't work so I replaced them with forward slashes. In TP's Folders, I did use the correct backslash when specifying paths.