"edit new file", "focus address" and other suggestions

[ottoflick]

Hi,
thanks for a great piece of software - the basic navigation and built-in network and archive capabilities are the best I've ever seen in a twin-panel file manager! I'd like have just a few suggestions of the things I'm missing from other similar programs ...
1. The "edit new file" function (prompt for a file name and launch of the editor with that file name)
2. A keyboard shortcut for focusing the address bar - if I want to type the address directly, I need to grab the mouse
3. A keyboard shortcut for the file context menu (now you need to right-click the file)
4. A network connection session manager that remembers servers' addresses (or is it possible to do it now?)
5. The Windows native file context menu

Could you add some of these functions to the application in some of the future versions?

[Nicolas]

Hey there,

Glad to hear you're enjoying muCommander, it's always pleasant to hear from happy users :)

To answer your points:

1) Edit new file: not a bad idea, I'll run that by Maxence (project leader).

2) Keyboard shortcut for the address bar: Do you mean the CTRL-G shortcut that is already implemented, or am I missing something ?

3) Shortcut for the contextual menu: agreed. That's already in our TODO list (http://trac.mucommander.com/ticket/155).

4) That's already implemented through the bookmarks and credentials:
- bookmarks remember server addresses.
- credentials allow you to tie sets of credentials to a specify server.

5) Native windows context menu: that one is a bit more of a problem: muCommander is a cross-platform software, which can make it hard to add system specific features such as the one you're requesting. The windows context menu, in particular, appears to be all but impossible (or at least we haven't figured out how) to interact without embedding native code, which we try to avoid at all costs.
If you happen to know of a manageable way to interact with the windows contextual menu in Java without having to use JNI, I'd love to hear from it though. Your request is a fairly common one and we'd be happy to implement it if at all possible.

Hope that helped !

Nicolas

[ottoflick]

Thanks very much ! I didn't know about 2) and 4), that's great!

5) - I really don't know how to implement a shell menu other than executing native code ... you could build a tiny exe file that does the menu displaying and call it as a separate process to avoid JNI, but that would probably be an even worse solution .

[ottoflick]

Well, I used that "worse" solution as a workaround ... and it really works !

So, to display a native windows file context menu in muCommander, get my little .exe file and add a custom command that calls it. The only drawback is that the menu gets displayed in the upper-left corner of the screen, but i don't see any way to tell it where to appear.

[Nicolas]

Hey there,

I'm glad you found a solution that works for you, and well done on hacking it yourself :)

For the moment, I'll redirect users that ask the same question to your post, but I don't think we'll integrate your "fix" to the main muCommander source code *for the moment*. On the other hand, as soon as we finish our plugin API, that's exactly the sort of things that we'd like to see. When that does happen, I might talk to you about re-writing it as a muCommander plugin and making it easily available for everyone.

Don't hold your breath though, we've been discussing the plugin API for more than a year and it's still not there :)

Cheers,
Nicolas

[ottoflick]

Ok, if you come up with a plugin API and I'm able to do it, I'll make a plugin ... anyway, the source code of the workaround is open so anyone can try .