Only read headers on large directories

WINSCP is an essential tool for me. The developer(s) should be proud of what they have accomplished with this product. So my complaint/feature request is very much constructive.

My one major complaint is that WINSCP bogs down when reading large directories using SFTP. For example, /usr/lib or usr/lib64. It appears to be reading all links and all directories before displaying the results. This can sometimes take 2, 3 or more minutes before results are displayed and I can do anything. If I browse to another directory and come back it does it all over again. I am not familiar with the inner workings of SFTP but there should be some way to improvement this.

Anything that can be done to speed up reading/displaying/acting on large directories would be greatly appreciated.

You can turn off resolving of the links:
https://winscp.net/eng/docs/ui_login_directories

That works, thanks for pointing it out. However, it only changes the current session. It does not change it globally. I have hundreds of saved sites. Instead of editing each one and remembering to uncheck that box each time I save a new site, is there any way to change this default globally?

I already tried changing a session and then selecting Manage > Set Defaults with that session selected for global defaults but it does not set that particular default globally.

Use

winscp.exe /batchsettings * ResolveSymlinks=0

See
https://winscp.net/eng/docs/rawsettings
https://winscp.net/eng/docs/commandline#batchsettings

Unfortunately this is not an option unless there is one more trick to get around the new problem. When I uncheck that box and then double click on files, it tries to open them as a directory or link (?). I have to right click on the file and manually select an editor. So that's not really an option because I am double clicking on files to open in my default external editor all the time.