MC Tabs

[Cosmin Popescu <cosminpopescu members fsf org>]

Dear mc developers,

Please find attached my contribution to mc: tabs like Total Commander has.

I am a regular midnight commander user. I use it for all my file exploring needs on several systems. I use it under Arch Linux and Ubuntu at home, under Red Hat on various servers that I administer and under Cygwin on Windows 7 at work.

One of the things that was missing were the tabs and I hated all the time, when I needed to copy some files from a location to several locations to have to change the folder so many times.

You will find an archive containing several patches that will add tabs to MC and a keymap file to map some shortcuts for the tabs. Another message will follow with some screen shots.

Inside the archive there is an executable file called apply-patch that will apply all the pathes on the required files. To install the patch, just un-archive the patch.tar.gz inside the root folder of mc-4.8.10 archive, cd to patch and run ./apply-patch.

I've implemented the following:

* Create tab (creates a new tab)

* Close tab (closes an existing tab, if the tab is not the only one)

* Rename tab (changes the title of the current tab)

* Next tab (changes the current tab)

* Previous tab (changes the current tab)

* Go to tab (displays a list of tabs from which the user can select one to switch to)

* Tabs options (some tabs options)

* Tabs sessions (the current opened tabs can be saved into sessions that can be later restored).

In the tabs options there is an option to restore the last tabs session. Please note that if this is checked, the current opened folder in the current panel will not be the folder from which mc is launched, but the folder that was last current when mc was closed.

From a technical point of view, the tabs are a simple list of structures containing a name (which can be NULL in which case the name of the current tab is the name of the current folder) and a path (a vfs_path_t structure) containing the current path of the tab. Whenever a tab is created, a new tab structure is added in the list. When a tab is changing the mc will do a simple cd by calling the do_cd function. I think that the implementation is pretty much straight forward.

The only thing a little bit complex might be the display_info function. That function will determine if all the tabs can be displayed, if not will calculate which can be displayed starting from the current tab to the left and then to the right if there is still space.

All my code is added between #ifdef WITH_TABS and #endif directives. The WITH_TABS can be set at configure time. By default the tabs will be compiled in, but can be deactivated by configure with "--disable-tabs" option.

I also added a small implementation for "string_file_ext" function. I needed it for my day to day work. It is added between the #ifdef WITH_EXT and #endif directives. The WITH_EXT is defined in the src/filemanager/panel.c file. If you don't want to use it, you can undefine the WITH_EXT.

Also, please note that in the src/filemanager/filegui.c you have a small bug at the line 288. The closing bracket of the function is inside the #ifdef directive, while the opening one is outside. The program will of course fail to compile under cygwin, so I've corrected it.

In the src/filemanager/mountlist.c, on the line 245 you are using the _GL_UNUSED macro. This will also fail to compile on my version of cygwin. Although I know that probably I have to add a dev package to have the macro defined, I don't think that it should be the case to do that just to avoid a warning (to add a dependency). I would do that with something like #ifdef _CYGWIN_ directive, but since this might be because of my installation of cygwin, I didn't modify it in the patch that I've sent you.

The patch is applied against the mc-4.8.10 downloaded from here: http://ftp.midnight-commander.org/mc-4.8.10.tar.xz

I've compiled the mc-4.8.10 with tabs on the following platforms:

* Arch Linux

* Red Hat 5

* Ubuntu

* Cygwin (win 7)

Please let me know if you would like to include the tabs in your main source repository. If not, do you have something against me posting the patch on sourceforce and github?

Thank you very much for maintaining MC.

Regards,
Cosmin Popescu.

Attachment: tabs.keymap
Description: Binary data

Attachment: tabs-patch.tar.gz
Description: GNU Zip compressed data