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Folder preview #575
Description
When previewing a folder, it is way better to show contents of the folder along with those macOS like folder dropdown (with a triangle to click to expand the folders) rather than showing the last modified which is almost useless information.
Seer does this as well, but well, it is paid.
Activity
xupefei commentedon Nov 13, 2019
It is actually quite easy to write a plugin for previewing folders based on existing codes of the
ArchiveViewer, but unfortunately no one want to contribute...rabelux commentedon Sep 24, 2020
Duplicate of #491
mooflu commentedon Jan 2, 2021
I took a stab at it here:
master...mooflu:originNot sure I like it. Maybe useful when scanning a bunch of items/folders.
For the single case it's not really any better than opening folder in explorer.
Maybe if it was more like OSX stacks grid and the QL window opened up near the folder as a way to quickly access an item and QL window closes once you open/select an item.
adyanth commentedon Jan 3, 2021
It is helpful since 1. Quicklook opens faster/smoother than explorer 2. When you want to open a deeply nested file/folder, double clicking 10 times is a pain, and you cannot see the contents of the previous folder at the same time.
@xupefei Do you have a README for the build so I can try it out (New to C# and windows app dev in general here 😅)? Or if you can build a nightly by taking a pull request from @mooflu here?
adyanth commentedon Jan 3, 2021
It is working great!
I forked this and added mooflu's branch here and saw that you have appveyor setup, so made a free account and here is the build artifacts.
One small issue I noticed, the files don't show their icons, which I can confirm even the Archive Previewer does not. So, this is looking damn good! Thanks @mooflu and @xupefei please check if this can be added as a core functionality in the next release 🥳
adyanth commentedon Jan 3, 2021
Can you think of a way to open the folder on double click or maybe enter? This is helpful if you have already gone down the rabbit hole of folders and want to open one of those in explorer. I see that the double click it tied to opening the top folder, and there are global hooks to Enter. Maybe a possibility of a right click?
xupefei commentedon Jan 3, 2021
@mooflu Great work and thanks for @adyanth's build 👍
Minor comments:
C:\) the counting is very slow. Maybe to ignore Drives in the Plugin interface (returnfalsewhenPath.GetPathRoot(path) == path)?The ArchiveViewer is designed to show the default icon of each file type since getting the real icon needs to decompress files. For this new plugin, it is possible to get real icons at the cost of delaying loading speed, unless icons are shown in a async way.
adyanth commentedon Jan 3, 2021
It is reasonably fast (~1-2s) on my D: drive which is larger and containing more data than C: but yes, very slow on C: due to the sheer count of files there. Yeah, stopping it for root filesystems would help.
I will try my hands on C# dev with this then, will try to create a module from hello world. (Not sure how forking that is useful, but will use it as a template)
Also, I thought that the folder preview would kind of be like the core, but yeah, a standalone plugin is good as well!
mooflu commentedon Jan 3, 2021
A folder-preview plugin sounds right. Not sure if an external plugin makes debugging harder - it was nice to run the whole thing in debug mode. I guess that's mostly bundling and I could keep a branch with the new plugin inside the main project.
Re: opening folder in explorer.
It currently saves the full path only for files and the click handler checks if a file exists before it opens it.
So it should be easy to allow folders: add full path for folders and remove file check since we know it exists.
Default for double click is to open the tippy, so it may be a bit surprising when it opens the folder externally.
Probably ok, though, since you can still open by clicking the tippy icon or right arrow via keyboard.
Re: folder scan
It would be better if it dynamically loaded as you tippy open a folder - no overall stats, though.
xupefei commentedon Jan 3, 2021
Debugging a plugin is not harder:
Debug\QuickLook.Plugins\QuickLook.Plugin.FolderViewer\(to maintain the dir structure -- QL loads plugins from this folder).Debug\.Debug\QuickLook.exe.QuickLook.exeand pause at any breakpoint in the plugin code.mooflu commentedon Jan 4, 2021
I've made some of the suggested changes.
WIP here: https://github.com/mooflu/QuickLook/tree/folder-preview/QuickLook.Plugin/QuickLook.Plugin.FolderViewer
adyanth commentedon Jan 4, 2021
@mooflu That was quick and impressive!
I am messing with what you have written, and I don't see a way to either use the QuickLook's keyboard hook or closing the panel once the double click handler runs on the Plugin/FileListView. Any idea what can be done here?
Here is the repo separated and cloned from the HelloWorld plugin, and the qlplugin here if anyone wants to try!
mooflu commentedon Jan 4, 2021
@adyanth Thanks for making a separated version. The readme says it's MIT but the source code is GPL. The is also true for the hello world plugin which uses QuickLook.common (GPL).
xupefei commentedon Jan 4, 2021
@mooflu Good point. I'll update QuickLook.Common to use MIT. Then @adyanth can update the submodule.
adyanth commentedon Jan 5, 2021
I still see both QuickLook.Common and the Hello world example are on MIT. The commit for Common I am referring to is already on MIT (I think?). Should I make any changes?
@mooflu Feel free to create your own repo if you need to, and I will fork from yours. I wanted to keep track of any changes I do, so created a repo.
xupefei commentedon Jan 5, 2021
@adyanth I updated QuickLook.Common from GPL to MIT. HelloWorld is already on MIT. So you have to update the submodule in the FolderViewer so that your code references to the MIT version of QuickLook.Common.
adyanth commentedon Apr 8, 2021
@mooflu would you like to add it to the official plugin list here? I have been using it for around 3 months now without issues! Once done, I guess this issue can be closed along with all the other duplicates.
rabelux commentedon Apr 11, 2021
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think there are two kinds of plugins. One are "internal" plugins that get shipped with QL, the others are "external" ones that need to be downloaded and installed. You @adyanth built an external plugin whereas @mooflu's approach need's to get merged to be be included. Did I get that right?
adyanth commentedon Apr 11, 2021
Correct, I extracted the changes by @mooflu to an external plugin so that I can test it, and as per @xupefei 's point 2 here.
rabelux commentedon Sep 20, 2021
I'll close this and refer to adyanth's solution with an installable plugin available here.