Forum > Suggestions
Source Editor - Open Source Folder Option
Tony Stone:
So I started digging through the Lazarus source so I could add an option to the filename tab in the source editor to open its folder. I figured it shouldn;t be too hard and this is something I wanted for a while and as I am poking around I looked at the full filename and directory in the status bar and thought that would be a great place to have an Open Folder option.
AND ONLY THEN did I think to right click on it and sure enough an Open Folder menu is there! That is awesome and I wish I knew that was there.
Either way I have a possible suggestion to improve it... I think the mouse cursor should change when it moves over it to the hyperlink looking folder and a right or left click should show the open folder menu. Or just simply clicking it should open the folder.
What do you all think? I am gonna experiment on my own right now and see if I can implement this.
Edit: And while looking through the source I found double clicking will also open the folder. This is not apparent at all. So glad to know this feature is there already.
Tony Stone:
Ok I never used git to make a patch. No clue if this is proper. But if anyone wants to try what I thought it should look like I made the changes and I think the patch will apply it.
Tony Stone:
Well this was my fun for tonight. I think it is very useful like this and would love to see the developers properly implement it. Thanks.
Martin_fr:
I'll have to see what other (incl team) think. I personally don't like the always underlined look in the status panel. (according to your image / still have to check the patch).
Also a link implies single click, which then can happen by accident if trying to grab the window border for resizing.
Looking at other editors (they may not all have the filename in the statusbar, but they have click-able items)
- VSCode changes the mouse pointer
- Visual Studio highlight some status panels on mouse over (like speed buttons), other (clickable) panels have no indicator (caret pos => goto dlg)
- Sublime has no indicator
- Notepad++ has no indicator
- Libre office Writer has no indicator, well it shows a hint on hover
- geany - not reacting to clicks
- gedit - no indicator on mouse over, but shows a drop down symbol next to clickable panels
Personally, to me, either mouse-pointer change or highlight (slight color change of the background) on mouse over seems the least intrusive (otherwise an icon next to the text, but that may run out of space). But open minded, to see what others think.
And as indicated, actually preferring the double click. But when you get an indicator (e.g. mouse pointer, then that may not be intuitive) But again lets see.
Also, about double click, there already is an exception: While recording an editor macro, the stop button is single click.
Tony Stone:
Thanks for the response Martin. Your feedback was exactly what I hoped for. I have not really used many other editors so I mostly went with what felt intuitive to me. And honestly now that I know it is there a double click is fine but like I said before I never had an indicator before to realize I could double click. I thought of a hint also but I feel like it isn't a place someone would often hover their mouse for too long. Not sure I ever looked for hints in status bars. Just because in my mind the status at is often the info you want. To me it is more for just viewing.
So as far as the hyperlink look I think you are right and a lot of people won't like it.
I think maybe it could have a small icon that looks clickable where the mouse cursor changes. If it looked like a tool bar button with a folder I think it would be very apparent to users that it is there.
I may have more time today to play around with those ideas and see how it looks.
At the very least if you find the patches useless there is one slightly more important spot I found in the code where the status panel was directly using index 5 instead of the constant for the filename panel. That should probably be fixed at the least I think. I'm on my phone so I can't remember the constant name and the procedure I changed it in.
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