Filer
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Ewen Pring (76) 3 posts |
- have a ‘move to’ menu entry. The only way to move an object currently is to use the keyboard (shift and drag). A ‘move to’ icon could be dragged to the desired location for a fully WIMP way of moving. - make date display format (when showing full info) customisable, e.g. ISO 8601 compliant format YYYY-MM-DD (instead of 24 Aug 2013). - vertical display option (sort by columns top to bottom rather than rows left to right as now) of icons other than in full info view - keyboard focus. would entail title bar turning yellow first, which it doesn’t do now. Would then be able to use cursor keyboard arrow keys to move which object is currently selected. maybe pressing return would simulate a double click to open a file. ctrl+c could copy etc. delete to delete! - inbuilt thumbnailing of graphics files without having to use 3rd party app - File/directory XXXX > ‘Rename’ (and ‘delete’ and ‘set type’?) menu entries should be greyed out if those operations cannot be performed ie object is protected. - why is there a ‘set type’ dialog box for directories, which does nothing if used? - when you have selected a number of items in a directory and go to ‘count’ menu, have sub menus to count number of top-level objects only, or to include (as now) all sub-dirs. - when a filename is too long to fit in window the filer puts a forward slash / character at the end. This makes it look like the filename ends there and only a file extn is missing. - option to show a column in full info view for hex filetype (whether or not there is a more userfriendly file type name associated with it) - ‘sort by type’ sorts by the hex filetype. but this isn’t displayed in any of the view modes (ie, full info)!. What is displayed- the filetype name such as “MSWord”- cannot be sorted alphabetically. should be able to sort by filetype name. - ‘count’ option results window could give more info than just no. files counted (including sub dirs) and bytes total. For example, it could give the number of files and the number of dirs. and the number of each in the top level directory only. {i’d like to select a group of dirs and count how many I selected) - option to swap 2 selected filenames - in the “new directory” box that comes up where you type the name and then can drag the icon to any filer window, it would be nice to have a tickbox “open after” which you can tick if you want, and it opens that directory in a new filer window. this can be useful with directories containing lots of objects where otherwise you have to find your new directory (which may entail selecting sort by date to see it at the top, then going back to sort by name or whatever). - when creating new directory, disable illegal (for file system) characters from appearing from the keyboard input (like #). If you do type them and press return, it currently gives an error and the whole operation is cancelled with no chance to go back and change typed name - option to sort the same way as !ftpc. ie. list all directories first in alph order, then all files in alph order - give a warning before deleting non-empty directories |
Rick Murray (539) 13806 posts |
Hello Ewen, Welcome to RISC OS Open!
Not a bad idea – for copying and deleting the originals might be a workaround, however copying can be slow for large files. If on the same partition, a move is a matter of changing where the file is indexed, not where the file itself is stored (in other words, instantaneous).
Yes; but please allow customisable separators (I detest the dash version, I use slashes, like yyyy/mm/dd). I think, to be honest, this is best handled by the Territory manager. The filer (and anything else) should ask the Territory manager how they would like this date to be presented, and Territory will reply accordingly. Saves having, in the future, multiple things reinventing the same wheel.
I think you can use ^K to delete selected files, can’t you? Very basic keyboard support, but something. I don’t like the use of “Delete”. RISC OS has no built it “Trash” system, so a specific unlikely-to-happen-by-mistake keypress (such as ^K) is preferable, IMHBLIO.
Something I miss from Thomas Olssen’s FilerPro / Filer+. Oh, and it did keyboard shortcuts and a dozen other cool things. One observation I recall from back then – generating the thumbnails wasn’t too quick, and caching them could use a bit of memory. This, obviously, is much less concern when we’re comparing 700+MHz systems with 256+Mb memory against a 25MHz machine with 4Mb onboard. ;-)
That’s actually a pretty good idea. I’d be inclined to go a step further and superimpose a little padlock icon on top of the file icon to make it clear that this file is “locked”.
Um… Good question.
What do you mean, only count one level deep? Why?
It does? I will need to look at my Pi more closely later, I thought it just clipped the filename.
Real nerds know all the filetypes by heart. Well, the important ones, at least. ;-)
While it is a perfectly reasonable idea, I don’t feel that the current by-hex method is specifically broken. Surely “sort by type” is useful to group files of a similar type? This isn’t always obvious on a PC either – for instance on my machine JPEGs are called “ULead PhotoImpact image” and PDFs are called “Adobe Acrobat Document”, so these will appear under ‘U’ and ‘A’ respectively, and not ‘J’ and ‘P’ as one might expect from the file extension. But this doesn’t matter, as when in sort by type, files of the same type are grouped regardless whether ‘X’ is grouped at the start, middle, or end of the list.
Not a bad idea.
…? Can’t you just count ’em?
I have a feeling this might be waaaay down the bottom of the wishlist. :-)
Not a bad idea.
Does the Filer know what characters are (in)valid for any given filesystem? I’m not sure how much specific knowledge the generic filer has. But certainly FileCore-specific symbols should be omitted. It’s an interesting question – you can filter out symbols in an icon using validation strings, but can you do the same with a writeable menu option? Mmm, now where did I put PRM3…? ;-)
Oh, how Windowsy! Somehow I prefer my things mixed together so I know “Music” is about halfway down where something beginning ‘M’ should be.
Yes. And preferably an “Are you sure?” if the directory contains subdirectories and/or there are more than about 30 files in there. Again, there is no default Trash or undo, so once you’ve committed, you’re stuck if you realise “oh my god, I clicked OK before actually reading the message”1 now what have I done? Thank you for taking the time to post your suggestions. 1 Come on, we’ve all done that… |
Trevor Johnson (329) 1645 posts |
– in the “new directory” box that comes up where you type the name and then can drag the icon to any filer window, it would be nice to have a tickbox “open after” which you can tick if you want, and it opens that directory in a new filer window.Not a bad idea. Perhaps adjust-dragging would be more in keeping with things, but whatever, this would certainly be useful. |
Trevor Johnson (329) 1645 posts |
Is 5 years of lurking some sort of record? |
Trevor Johnson (329) 1645 posts |
Sorry. I take that back, after recalling your bug reports! |
Frank de Bruijn (160) 228 posts |
What are you on about? He’s been here longer than you, judging by his ‘user number’.
It actually does that here (RO 5.21, 23-07-2013). Turn yellow I mean.
That would be nice…
…but not sure about that one. On VRPC I’ve switched on the option to warn before deleting because the Delete key works like that. Much too easy to hit accidentally.
Yup.
Good one.
And this. Use that option all the time on my Linux box. And Rick, are you sure Windows was the first to come up with it? |
Colin (478) 2433 posts |
The writable menu option should be replaced with a dbox. |
Rick Murray (539) 13806 posts |
Posts = 1. There’s a difference between reading and participating…
I didn’t say it was the first, I just said it was “Windowsy”, which given the market share and deployment of Windows since W95, may well be the most common example of this behaviour, which is not to say that they were the first. ;-) |
Michael Drake (88) 336 posts |
There’s another thread full of filer improvement ideas here: http://riscosopen.org/forum/forums/2/topics/150 Rik Griffin was going to try a rewrite using the Toolbox. I don’t know how far it got. |
GavinWraith (26) 1563 posts |
Every time I upgrade RISC OS I have to repeat the rigmarole of patching the Filer module so that the Delete option appears in red. That way it is harder to delete things accidentally. Is it not time that the Filer module got its menu data from resourceFS instead of having it hardwired in the code? |
Steve Fryatt (216) 2103 posts |
- when a filename is too long to fit in window the filer puts a forward slash / character at the end. It does display “…”. Some fonts (might be the iSV ones, but ICBW) have a “/” where an ellipsis is expected, which also messes up many menu entries leading to dialogue boxes. Try switching the desktop to Homerton and see what happens. |
Ewen Pring (76) 3 posts |
Hello all, and thanks for the welcome Rick.
Thanks for pointing out this is due to certain fonts (I was using Franklin) not having an ellipsis, Steve; no fault with the filer there then.
You’re right Frank, filer windows already do turn yellow, so that request of mine was pointless.
I just tried this with 2 files selected but couldn’t get them to delete, I tried Ctrl-K, Shift-K and Alt-K. If there were an existing shortcut key combo I’d expect it to be shown next to the delete option in the filer menu.
Presumably something along the lines of how NetSurf stores a cache in !scrap. Perhaps being auto deleted after a while. I would definitely say no to a ‘hidden’ file in the directories with the images which contains thumbnails like windows. Don’t modern digital camera photos also contain miniature versions of the image anyway, thereby meaning no processor time needed to create thumbnails on the hoof? I realise my suggestions about counting files and swapping filenames are probably not high up the priority list, they are just there because I once needed that feature so I noted it down. |
Chris Evans (457) 1614 posts |
Hi Ewen for quoting it is: |
nemo (145) 2529 posts |
Ewen suggested:
Or a ‘Move’ tickbox in the Copy savebox.
It doesn’t do ‘nothing’, it asks the underlying file system to set the type of the directory. The Filer doesn’t currently make any use of that information (if the underlying filing system can store it) but that’s not the same as it doing ‘nothing’.
Uggh. RO4 and anyone familiar with punctuation use an ellipsis.
Oh that. You can blame the Electronic Font Foundry for that ‘innovation’. I used to supply an ‘EFFLatin1’ Encoding to apply that character set to fonts with the Acorn Latin1 Encoding.
I can’t imagine one would often want the new directory NOT to open… and one would hardly be inconvenienced if it did. In other words, the Filer should always open the new directory. |
Steve Fryatt (216) 2103 posts |
Some fonts (might be the iSV ones, but ICBW) have a “/” where an ellipsis is expected. Ah. Apologies to iSV, then. I’ve largely forgotten whose fonts are whose on this system now, unfortunately. |
Ewen Pring (76) 3 posts |
I wouldn’t agree with that myself, there could be times when I want to create lots of directories and I don’t want to open them at the same time. Making this automatically happen could be an annoyance. Especially if the new windows open partly obscuring the original one. I’ve finally edited my earlier post to show the quoting correctly; thanks for the info Chris. It would be great if the ‘Formatting Help’ that appears at the bottom of each page had a quick mention of how to quote. I’ve also come up with another point to mention. If I use the filer to rename a (text) file with capitals eg I type the name “ABC”, then it actually appears as “Abc”. Is this the filer automatically deciding to decapitalise, or is it perhaps some 3rd party module I’ve got installed? I don’t remember this happening in the past. It has proved annoying; I recently had to create a whole raft of directories whose names were the initials of people, I wanted them all in capitals and I can’t have it! I know case makes no difference to the underlying way the filing system works, but the appearance matters too. |
Chris Hall (132) 3554 posts |
There is a bug which means that if you rename a file ‘ABc’ to ‘abC’ it does nothing. In other words you cannot change the capitalisation of a file by renaming it (or by copying a file of different capitalisation onto it). You have to do it in two steps: ‘ABc’ to ‘ABCD’ then to ‘abC’ works. |
Sprow (202) 1155 posts |
Can you name a specific filing system for which this is true? LanManFS used to have a problem, but that was fixed in 2009 , and I’m assuming your sweeping aspersion is more recent than that. |
Chris Johnson (125) 825 posts |
You can certainly rename to change the case in 5.21 on the Iyonix using ADFS from the desktop. How are you doing the rename? I am pretty sure rename to change case works. My ID3TagEd app does this specifically – it does a case aware compare of old and new filenames and renames if the non-case filename is the same but the case differs. I have never seen any problems using adfs, sharefs and fat32fs. |
Chris Hall (132) 3554 posts |
Seems to be just DOS image files (which is DOSFS I think?). Can’t duplicate it now using hostfs, scsifs or adfs… |
Chris Evans (457) 1614 posts |
I’ve seen this ‘feature’ and I’ve never knowingly used LanManFS. Sorry I can’t recall the FS! |
Steffen Huber (91) 1949 posts |
I have seen this feature with various versions of HostFS. But we all know that HostFS is broken in multiple ways. Never seen it on other FSes with the exception of a very early version of X-Files. Or was it raFS? Or TBAFS? |
Trevor Johnson (329) 1645 posts |
ISTR seeing it too and have never used HostFS. Will file a bug report when I’m able to check (assuming I can identify it as repeatable, etc.)… if no one beats me to it! |
Sprow (202) 1155 posts |
If it is limited to DOSFS, I’d append it as a note to ticket #313, since the rename function is already barely working – anyone fixing it might as well get cased renames right while they’re at it. |
Steve Drain (222) 1620 posts |
I have just come up against this with a USB stick and a Pi, which uses Fat32FS. I transferred a lot of apps so that I could move my development work from machine to machine. It has been a pain, because I have many BASIC libraries that call an initialistion function with the same name as the file. I have solved my immediate problem, but it might still be something worth fixing. |
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