On Fri, Jul 24, 2020 at 12:04:01PM -0700, tim Rowledge wrote:
> 
> 
> > On 2020-07-23, at 8:36 PM, Chris Muller <asqueaker at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 
> > It depends on how many and how deep the directories you have, and what kind of HD they're on.
> 
> Yes, I guess the directory tree traversing might take a long time in some cases; which in itself is probably sometihng deserving some profiling. Also one might consider a better navigation idiom than the rather (over, in my opinion) extensive "all the subdirectories of my parent directory and up we go" approach. It is (was) a *major* pain for RISC OS because of the expectation of multiple filing systems related to devices that have to try to spin up CDs etc just to decide whether there is a root there. But that just opens up a long complaint about the appalling state of filename handling.
> 
> >  But another few seconds quickly accumulates simply from having to grab the mouse just to regain focus on the field where I can type the filename.
> 
> The keyboard focus is in the text field immediately the dialogue is opened, so that ought not be a problem. I guess if it really has taken multiple seconds to build the directory tree morph then one might have moved the mousse around in that time and changed that?
> 

+1 for profiling.

-1 for more preferences.


> The thing that I suspect would make a lot of people happy and have uses in many dialogue related situations is the building of a collapsing dialogue section. We had some discussion of the idea a while back and Marcel tried a few ideas. The dialogue ought to open with a label, the text field and an 'click me for more' icon - something vaguely like this -
> 
> Clicking the down-caret would open it up to a full directory handling tree widget. I believe this would be a major improvement.
> 

That looks like a good approach.

Dave