Re: MC Tabs

[Egmont Koblinger <egmont gmail com>]

Oh, I've found your keymap :)

Most of the Ctrl+Alt+letter combos are taken by my window manager, so
I'm back to entering Meta by pressing Escape.  Still, Esc followed by
C-Left or C-Right or C-g don't work for me, I'm not sure why.

On Tue, Oct 15, 2013 at 8:37 PM, Egmont Koblinger <egmont gmail com> wrote:
> Hi Cosmin,
>
> This is a very interesting idea.  Please let me give feedback after 5
> minutes of using it :) Please note that I'm not an official mc
> developer, just an occasional contributor.
>
> I always wondered why mc has hardcodedly only 2 panels, not allowing
> more.  E.g. the screen could be divided in 2x2 parts and copy/move
> operations could have a direction (horizontal, vertical or diagonal).
> Your new feature approaches a similar goal.
>
> To accomplish the above mentioed goal, i.e. to be able to have 3
> panels and quickly copy between *any* two, your patch desperately
> lacks the "move this tab to the other panel" (or something similar)
> option with menu entries and convenient shortcuts, or maybe ^U could
> just swap two tabs but not two whole panels.  Or, tabs should not be
> per-panel but common to the two, in each panel you could easily jump
> to any of the tabs.
>
> Basic tab operations (next/prev/new/close) should also be something
> that has convenient short hotkeys by default, and those hotkeys are
> mentioned in the F9 dropdown.
>
> The current UI trend (apart from a couple of legacy apps that had tab
> support before it became widely used) is to place tabs on the top,
> rather than the bottom.
>
> The "create tab" and such menu options operate on the currently active
> panel, rather than on the Left/Right panel according to whose menu
> entry is selected.  (E.g. Left panel is active, invoke Right->Create,
> a new tab should be created on the right panel.)
>
> Tabs should be selectable by a single mouse click (also scrolling
> should be doable by mouse if too many tabs are open to fit).
>
> Having non-ascii characters (don't forget about CJK either) cause
> artifacts with highlighing the active tab (the end of the tab bar gets
> the highlighed background too).
>
> Sure there are a couple of more issues, but I kind of like your idea
> and would welcome such a feature.  Nice work for a start!
>
> One more thing: please use unified diffs, they are much more reable
> and more portable to newer mc versions.
>
>
> egmont
>
> On Mon, Oct 14, 2013 at 8:20 PM, Cosmin Popescu
> <cosminpopescu members fsf org> wrote:
> > 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.
> >
> > _______________________________________________
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> > https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/mc-devel