MC Tabs

Egmont Koblinger egmont at gmail.com
Tue Oct 15 18:50:51 UTC 2013


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 at 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 at 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.
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> mc-devel mailing list
>> https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/mc-devel
>>



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