Possibility to "lock" a tab

[asemere]

Hi, guys! Great App!

I noticed what you add Tabs in last release. It's very uselful thing for my, when I was on TotalCommander, but you haven't one simple, but very necessary function to lock a tab in right-click context menu of a tab! Lock a tab, but allow to change current folder, but if user leave this tab to other in that panel and then goes back -- it will be initial when like it was locked. With this feature users can do some kind of bookmarks with tabs too -- very useful, just one click and you are there!

I think it's not difficult to implement this feature. Donate and hope on you, guys! Thanks ... Yes, and Search feature (it's a Pain, I know

[arik]

Hi,

Thanks for the suggestion!
I thought about "locking" tabs also, as you can see at: http://trac.mucommander.com/wiki/TabSupport
but I thought that the effect of the locking will be different: when you lock a tab its location won't change until it's unlocked, and when trying to enter any subfolder/archive file on a locked tab, it will be opened in a new tab

I think that the way you descibed will be confusing as the user might forget that he locked the tab, and then he'll be suprised that the tab's location changed from its previous location (at best he'll notice that and will change it back, in the worst case he'll make operation like copying or moving to a different destination than planned)

Anyway, I'll discuss it with Maxence

Thanks,
Arik

[arik]

Hey,
Tabs locking funtionality is now included in the nightly build release.
It would be great if you could check it, and provide feedback.

Thanks,
Arik

[tikomir]

Couldn't even create a folder in latest nb, so I immediately returned to 0.9 stable and had not checked new tab locking feature.

Besides, tabs are pointless feature for me alongside of bookmarks. You could just add a possibility to open a navigation list of bookmarks (bookmarks view) in a separate panel like tree view and that would be quite enough. The main feature of tabs is that they complicate the application itself bringing nothing essentially new. It is so unnecessarily to invest time in tab feature when there is no CUT operation etc!!! Do you arik and Nicolas want to make MC to be simple and usable application, or want to follow cluttered main-stream file managers? If you continue to behave like this, I'll have to leave MC and try something else that is cluttered too, but much faster and without bugs! My suggestion is: abandon tab feature and implement "bookmarks view" and then continue with something useful and not necessarily fancy. Best regards for both of you.

[arik]

Hi tikomir,

Thanks for reporting this bug. I've commited a fix which will be available in the nightly build version in a few minutes.

Regarding the second part - There are many features in muCommander, some of them you might find useful and some less useful. the fact is that the tabbed browsing support is one of the three must wanted features with search functionality and background operations (I checked it once by counting the number of request in the trac (and bugzilla before) and in the forums). I also find it useful for my personal use.
You're right that the tabbed browsing support makes some things more complicated. Maxence and I talked about it and we try to make sure we don't carry away so that we would be able to work on more important things, some of them I mentioned above, and not making the application too "cluttered" as you say. indeed, there are bugs as this is a nightly build version and I've just commited many changes without many tests - I just wanted to get feedback for those changes I've made by people who were interested in them. as I said before, thanks for reporting the bug, but don't be disappointed by that - we would make much more testing before declaring that a stable release.

the next release (0.9.1) is a minor release that focus on improving the tabbed browsing and the restoring of data from previous runs (and fix some open tickets of course). there might be another minor release, and after that we plan to start working on a major release with big things on our TODO list.

Regards,
Arik

[tikomir]

What about idea I gave to you: "bookmarks view"? I guess it can be implemented easily, i.e. much easier than the tab support. Bookmarks view should appear at the same place as the "tree view" (or as a third panel between the two already existed, or as a separate child window), possibly with some key shortcuts (e.g. only the first few of them) for direct access. Yes, I know that we have Alt+4 for bookmark access, but it is much more useful for users to have an opportunity to have this list in front of their eyes all the time. For shortcuts, I can recommend combination of "Insert" button, followed by the number 0-9, so I can keep my hands on the keyboard. Insert button should not be held down during pressing 0-9 keys, i.e. press&release Insert, than press 0-9 for bookmark selection.

In fact, you should abandon current function of "Insert" button and assign a new one to it. "Insert" button should show bookmarks list like Alt+4 do, but with extended functionality like previously described. This is a must and urgent. You can decide on creating "bookmarks view" now or later, or you can give up at all, although I find it useful to have bookmarks list visible all the time as we can see tabs all the time.

And, "CUT file" should be placed on top of your todo list!

[arik]

I don't think that a bookmark tree will be a proper replacement for the tabbed browsing - tabbed browsing let you maintain open connections\views for several location and switch between them quickly without adding them to the bookmark list (if I'll add the servers I connect to to the bookmarks list, it will be large one so it would be harder to find a location in it). it would be even more useful when we'll add background operations.

In general, the bookmarks tree is not a bad idea, it's something we could think of. I don't think that it's urgent though..