Are Filer menus customisable by apps/modules?

Is it possible for an app/module to add an extra item to Filer menus? For example, in Windows, if you have the app “Notepad++” installed then you get an extra option, “Open with Notepad++”, when you right-click on a text file.

Is there a way to do this in RISC OS? I didn’t see anything relevant in the PRMs but I figured that I’d ask the experts :)

Is it possible for an app/module to add an extra item to Filer menus?

Have a look at QuickFiler. What it does is intercept keypress events to provide keyboard shortcuts for existing menu items and amends the visible menus.

I believe what you’re looking at would need to filter the events for keypress and mouse click.

NB. most definitely not an expert. Just been twiddling trying to integrate the QuickFiler features into the OS Filer module.

Worth adding that wrt the specific example given by Chris, RISC OS allows any file to be shift-double-clicked (or double-click-hold, if configured) to load into your current editor, so that specific example wouldn’t be necessary. But I’m sure there are other examples that are.

Might be worth considering some Edit vs View system for files generally – for example, you probably wouldn’t want to use Photodesk as your JPEG viewer, but you would to edit JPEGs… But that’s a whole other discussion I guess. (ponders a different kind of alias$@ variable for editing types).

Chris, do you have a particular filetype in mind that you want to treat specially?

What extra choice do you want to add?

I believe what you’re looking at would need to filter the events for keypress and mouse click.

Thanks; I’ll read the Filter Manager docs and see what I can figure out.

Worth adding that wrt the specific example given by Chris, RISC OS allows any file to be shift-double-clicked (or double-click-hold, if configured) to load into your current editor

Right. I didn’t really pick the best example there :)

Chris, do you have a particular filetype in mind that you want to treat specially?

Probably not a particular type, no. I’m not exactly sure what I’m trying to do yet – there are a few Explorer integrations that I use in Windows and it’d be nice to be able to make RISC OS equivalents, but at this stage I’m just trying to figure out what is and isn’t possible. Some potential examples are:

1. Choose an arbitrary file, open the menu, and “do something”
2. Open the menu over a directory display and “do something” to the entire directory and/or the files inside it
3. Possibly intercept an existing menu entry, such as to make Delete actually send the file to a “Recycle Bin”.

I don’t want to make my question too open-ended though or we’ll be here forever! At this stage I’ll play around with the Filter Manager and see what I can do.

Possibly intercept an existing menu entry, such as to make Delete actually send the file to a “Recycle Bin”.

Ah, already done – I’m running a module called TrapDelete as part of an install of Transient¹ and a self modified Filer module:

Result is that Del is a delete(move) into Transient which will hold it for a period and then offer to clean that out at the end of the configured period.

Shift-Delete does a full permanent delete.

Note: Without the modified Filer the keys are Ctrl-K for delete captured by Transient and Shift-Crtl-K for the permanent delete.
With the modified Filer I currently have both Del or Ctrl-K. (modified by Shift as per Shift-Ctrl-K)

Del and Shift-Del will be familiar to Windows and Linux users. I retained the Ctrl-K as something older RO users could relate to.

¹ Transient is one of Fred Graute’s offerings. TrapDelete is a module Fred hasn’t formally released although it’s been around since 2014.

Transient is one of Fred Graute’s offerings.

Hmmm, just noticed Fred still has the 2.07 revision of Transient showing on the linked page as apposed to the 2.08b (26-Jul-2014) I’m using. Maybe Fred could formally release the whole 2.08b (or later) package.

There was a proposal here on how a basic extension/plugin system could be added to the filer menus.

Thanks for the comments. Filter Manager looks pretty complex! I also discovered WimpSWIVe, although its own documentation says that it’s very hacky. On the other hand, I’ve started thinking up a way of accomplishing one of my plans using drag and drop, so customising the menus could probably go on hold for now. It’s a pity that the extension system didn’t get any traction.