Filer Questions and Suggestions

@nbache
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Using your own directory/file (with spaces in its name) for testing purposes.

@thread

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I read from another thread that there were reasons to name RAM Disk that way it is. Maybe it should be left as it is eventually. People have to be just more careful when making software.

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I guess this have been reported already "millions" of times.

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Don't know about millions -- but now I have made sure it's in the Bugzilla.

Best regards,

Niels

What I forgot to test previous time is if I put quotation marks around that "RAM Disk:" then auto completion works. But how many end users realizes that. Then if that feature was made to work without quotes then it would take parameters as part of the name also, I guess.

there are a few things which could be improved :

* the help text does not appear for user buttons
* in root view, when selecting an assign and go parent goes back to root view
* when browsing dirs, going back leads the lister to view the dirs alphabetically and not aroung the dir you just went in (not so convenient when you are looking in XYZ and go back or parent, you are back at ABC !)


there are probably other minor things BUT filer is a usefull tool, so thank you Orgin !

There are quite a few "little" things which could do with fixing/improving in Filer. Off the top of my head:

* When creating a new folder, the Create button is not bold, so pressing enter does not close the window (meaning I have to annoyingly move the mouse to finish the operation).

* When I wrongly enter a non-existant volume (e.g. FooBar: ) I have to cancel a "Please insert volume" requester FOUR times, which is totally daft (and then click AGAIN to dismiss a "The selected path is invalid" requester). Rather annoying when it happens, and surely easily fixed.

* When deleting some files, it does not tell you HOW MANY files/folders are selected, therefore ones not visibile may be accidentally deleted.

* Selecting files using pattern matching causes any previously selected files to be cleared. Makes this features much less useful, although clearing might be useful in some cases so I guess there needs to be a tick box for this (with clearing the default to avoid accidental surprises).

* No Help text for user buttons, as already stated. (I believe this is a ReAction limitation?)

* When going to the Parent, the top of the folder is shown, rather than showing the folder we just left. (I think this was already stated in a different way.)

* BUG: A 640*10 pixel picture will crash the Thumbnail generation program. I guess it tries to create a thumbnail 32 pixels wide and *0* pixels high!

* BUG?? Filer's custom FileType system doesn't seem very reliable. At least I told it to match files of type "m", but this doesn't work.

ok I add another thing which still makes me use DOPUS more than Filer : handling of archived files.

the way DOPUS handles them is marvelous and I have not seen this feature on any other file manager.
you can browse an archive, see picture and text without actually having to extract to RAM: and thats the most usefull feature for me...

if Filer would integrate this arcdir blabla, that would be wonderfull !!

@ChrisH

"* When creating a new folder, the Create button is not bold, so pressing enter does not close the window (meaning I have to annoyingly move the mouse to finish the operation)."

This was fixed over a year ago. See here for what has been fixed or not

Reiterating requests over and over again for fixing things that are already fixed isn't going to get them more fixed that what they already are.

"* When I wrongly enter a non-existant volume (e.g. FooBar: ) I have to cancel a "Please insert volume" requester FOUR times, which is totally daft (and then click AGAIN to dismiss a "The selected path is invalid" requester). Rather annoying when it happens, and surely easily fixed."

I'll add it to the list. And no, not easy to fix.

"* When deleting some files, it does not tell you HOW MANY files/folders are selected, therefore ones not visibile may be accidentally deleted."

Added to the list

"* Selecting files using pattern matching causes any previously selected files to be cleared. Makes this features much less useful, although clearing might be useful in some cases so I guess there needs to be a tick box for this (with clearing the default to avoid accidental surprises)."

I suggest you read the readme file. There's actually something in it that is worth reading even though I only spent an enormous amount of time writing it.

"* No Help text for user buttons, as already stated. (I believe this is a ReAction limitation?)"

Yes that is "was?" a reaction issue. It doesn't (didn't?) handle dynamic GUI's very well in this regard.

"* When going to the Parent, the top of the folder is shown, rather than showing the folder we just left. (I think this was already stated in a different way.)"

Added to the list. Not easy to do.

"* BUG: A 640*10 pixel picture will crash the Thumbnail generation program. I guess it tries to create a thumbnail 32 pixels wide and *0* pixels high!"

A check for 0 width or height has been added to the code.

"* BUG?? Filer's custom FileType system doesn't seem very reliable. At least I told it to match files of type "m", but this doesn't work."

Filer doesn't have any custom file type system. It uses something called "deficons". I'm sure there's a manual somewhere on how to define new file types for it.

@Lio

The ToDo list can be found here

@orgin
Thanks for the (unexpected!) reply.

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I thought it *might* have been fixed already (from vague recollection of some old conversation), but since it still isn't fixed in the latest (admittedly rather old) public release of Filer, I didn't see any harm in mentioning it again... sorry if this came across as "pestering" or similar.

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Hmmm, I find that surprising: No need to explain why (unless you like satisfying other people's curiosity), but from my naive perspective I'd have thought you could do a test lock (with DOS requesters temporarily disabled), and if it didn't exist then don't try to do anything with it.

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Thanks (and same goes for all other additions to the almost impenetrablely huge To Do list).

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OK, I did a search in it, as I'm not going to manually read 1000 lines of text that 99% of the time tell me stuff I already know (very boring). I guess you mean " - Hold down left shift when clicking on Pattern and the matching entries will add to the currently selected entries."? That is indeed useful, but also very surprising, and so I'd argue not the best way to do it:

Shift clicking usually changes behaviour BEFORE you have the chance to modify it using a proper GUI. For example Copy (vs Copy As), where a plain Copy would not normally open a GUI. Given that Pattern matching *does* open a GUI before doing anything, it would seem much more "discoverable" (to use GUI designer parlance) if there was a standard tick box.


On the issue of RTFM, I have found in my programs that users rarely read the manual, even after I spend a lot of time & effort on it. I think this is a general result, because modern GUI designers actually assume users won't read manuals, and that instead GUIs should be as "discoverable" as possible.

I know I have often been tempted (and sometimes still do) tell users to read the damn manual for my program when complaining about something it already does... but these days I usually use it as an indication that my program is not obvious enough (too complex or illogical) and that the GUI should be improved. i.e. I have given-up trying to change users, and instead try to change my program to adapt to "real users" better.

But that's just my view, and you are of course free to disagree! The nice thing about writing about your own programs is that they can work how you want

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Fair enough, although I find this somewhat unexpected/surprising given the current GUI. To me (at least) it seems to suggest/imply that you are adding new filetypes, rather than modifying existing ones. The only way I can see to change that is to replace the Type string gadget with something that allows the user to select from a list of existing DefIcon filetypes.

@orgin
I have a couple more (small but important) improvement requests, to bring Filer's behaviour closer to DOpus5's polished perfection:

* Cancelling an operation (such as rename) should not clear the remaining (unused) selections. This allows one to easily resume what you were doing (perhaps with some change).

* Skipping an operation for some file (such as renaming it) should leave it selected. This is a little more arguable, but it is often handy for knowing which files you skipped so that you can do something (probably different) with them.


ALSO, I know you have a lot of "fish to fry" for Filer, but one big thing that might be worth considering is some kind of "virtual filesystem" abstraction. This would act as a kind of wrapper around the actual filesystem, and all common operations (list folder, rename file, delete file, etc) would go via this wrapper. This would NOT be particularly complicated, as I imagine it would simply be an object with methods like "listFolder()", "renameItem()", etc.

Once that was done, you could consider making search results appear as another "virtual filesystem", thus allowing the user to open (and even manipulate) the actual files in the search result inside a normal Filer window!

This would also make it plausible for *other people* to add viewing (and perhaps even modifying) of LHA (etc) archives through a normal Filer window. Ideally the "virtual filingsystems" would become some kind of (SObj based?) plug-in, if it wasn't too hard to do...

I think this would be a better solution than ad-hoc solutions to "- Investigate if xadmaster could be used to browse archives." & "- Move search result into normal view (New view mode)".

@ChrisH

"* Cancelling an operation (such as rename) should not clear the remaining (unused) selections. This allows one to easily resume what you were doing (perhaps with some change)."

Added


"* Skipping an operation for some file (such as renaming it) should leave it selected. This is a little more arguable, but it is often handy for knowing which files you skipped so that you can do something (probably different) with them."

Added

"Virtual filesystem"

The Filer already has a way to deal with this. Although not the same way as you are proposing. The search result is already moved to the internal window, but not yet finished. The OS4Depot mode works in the same way.

@orgin Quote:
I am curious as to how you are actually (going to) do it, if it isn't too hard to roughly explain? Is it more or less complicated than my own suggestion?

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People have asked to integrate Filer into Workbench. If it was possible to launch Filer into given directory from a script then it would be really easy. Or if FilerCX had an Arexx port. Hide your partitions in Workbench prefs. Make a script to launch Filer for every partition and leave them out on desktop (Leave out from Icons menu of Workbench). That's it.

>orgin #3
The todo list ...
Filer is great file manager tool...nice work!
I looked for reference to python...n0ne. If I click on a python script with 'Filer' it defaults to Python interactive mode; that's not what I want; execute the script is what I want. I tried creating a 'user button' with 'python {f}' and 'python {o}' and it defaults to interactive. Is there a way to set this up, or is this a 'todo' do?!

I rediscovered Filer's bug tracker (yes I know I suck), so posted a new bug report here.

@orgin
You don't seem to have added any of the bugs reported in this thread to the bug tracker. Should we still use the bug tracker ourselves?

@Origin

Is version 53.32 available yet?

I am using 53.31 from OS4Depot, and when I click a column heading [name/size/date etc] to sort by that column, the headings bar disappears.
I just wondered if this is the 'fix' shown on OpenAmiga, and if so is 53.32 available somwhere?

@Swoop

Only on my computer. I could share it but the search functionality is completely disfunctional.

"another thing which still makes me use DOPUS more than Filer : handling of archived files."

Last time I checked Dopus was not able to extract the archive correctly, for example some hyperion .lha packages fail and they recommend to use the arc tool.

Is there a fix for the Dopus lha issue?