>
> 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.
>

My understanding is it's a VM issue.


> 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.
>

+1


>
>  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?
>

It's because I use mouseOverForKeyboardFocus.  The dialog doesn't always
open with the text field under hand, so initial focus is lost.


> 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.
>

I know that's the conventional look for "apps" that use files as their only
storage, but would you be open to considering a more "Squeak-style"
approach?  What if the regular text menu could have a "select file or
directory" entry added to it?  So it would be available _everywhere_ in the
IDE.  This "Squeak-style" approach preserves its sandbox capability
modelessly (e.g., without needing a preference), while still providing
developers that flexible hook for launching your dialog to select and paste
fully-qualified names, anywhere.

Unfortunately, Marcel concluded that ToolBuilder can't open a modal upon a
modal without at least hacking (that's paraphrased, BTW).  If Marcel's
finding is true, at least there's always the single-field text box as a
preference.

 - Chris
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