The Tools Menu | Menu Sections | The Context Menu

## The Options menu

This is the "Everything else" menu: it contains some miscellaneous things, plus Configure.
The first menu item is Show Recursive dir sizes. Huh? In a dir-view, select a directory containing subdirectories, and in the file-view select one of the subdirectories. In the third section of the statusbar, you'll see "Directory: Foo x.xK of files" where x.x is the total size of the directory's files. By default, 4Pane ignores any subdirectories in this calculation. Why? Because if the selected directory has lots of children, it takes a while recursively to calculate their total size: for example, my /usr takes 15 seconds.
However you may sometimes want the total size. If so, with this item set the statusbar would have read "Directory: Foo x.xK of files and subdirectories". You'll also notice that the fourth statusbar section has changed from (probably) "D F H *" to "D F R H *".
Note that recursive sizes apply only to directories in the file-view. In the interest of speed, dir-views ignore this setting.
Then comes Retain relative Symlink Targets. Huh again? When you Move or Paste a normal symlink (or dirs containing them), 4Pane cleverly retains the original target of the symlink. Most of the time this is what you'll want to happen in the case of relative symlinks too, but occasionally you might prefer it not to happen e.g. if you have a symlink libfoo.so pointing to libfoo.so.0 in the same directory, and you move both. By setting or resetting this item, you can select whichever of these behaviours is appropriate.
An example may make that clearer. Suppose there is a dir ~/subdir/. It contains a file foo and a relative symlink pointing to it, foolink. You move foolink to ~/differentDir/. If Retain relative Symlink Targets is set, ~/differentDir/foolink will still point to ~/subdir/foo. If not, it will point to ~/differentDir/foo which doesn't exist, so the symlink will be marked as broken.
Starting with 4Pane 6.0 there is another item in this section: Keep Modification-time when pasting files. When Moving or Pasting files, if the modification time of the new files matters at all you will usually want it to be the current time. But sometimes you might prefer the 'cp -a' behaviour, where the timestamp is set to that of the originals. If this item is ticked, those original times are (as far as possible) preserved. It works for files, dirs and symlinks. It doesn't work for rarer things such as hardlinks, and not when 'browsing' inside archives (where timestamps seem always to be retained).
The next two menu items are Save Pane Settings, which happens immediately, and Save Pane Settings on Exit. The settings saved are what you see on the screen: 4Pane's size, which panes are shown, in which orientation, which file-view columns etc.
You'll remember from the Edit menu that 4Pane has its own Trash and Delete 'Cans'. The next two items, Empty the Trash-can and Permanently delete 'Deleted' files, give you the option of emptying these. While this is the only way (apart from brute force) of emptying the Trash-can, remember that 4Pane automatically empties the Delete-can whenever it exits. However you might occasionally want to Delete it earlier e.g. if you've deleted very large files, and you're short of space on your hard disc.
The final item, Configure 4Pane, is discussed here.