Page 1 of 1

Add Comments column to allow for comments per file

Posted: Thu Aug 10, 2017 6:57 am
by bchuter
In TC you are able to add comments to files with "CTRL->Z" and you can then change your panel view to include comments column.
I found this useful when working on files and being able to comment on the files. Eg what i last did in that file etc.
I believe TC creates a hidden file called "description.ion" in each folder for comments. It can also intelligently follow the comments
so if you copy or move the file out to another folder etc, the comments for the file move with it (this following of comments is a check box in settings i think, so you can have it follow or not)

Re: Add Comments column to allow for comments per file

Posted: Sat Aug 26, 2017 11:26 pm
by JayB
In macOS this would (should!) be solved by extended attributes, because xattrs are awesome. There is really no need to create hidden or invisible files. The question is just whether NC should use the standard xattr for Finder Comments or create its own xattr, e.g. com.magnumbytes.Comment. Finder Comments are md, i.e. Spotlight (com.apple.metadata:kMDItemFinderComment), i.e. slow, as mike has written here – http://magnumbytes.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=211 –, and an invisible file that you need to parse first (and potentially edit after file operations) wouldn't be faster either—on the contrary!—so it would probably boil down to a proprietary xattr solution, comparable to what Rixstep has achieved with Rixtag, but that needs some nasty bit of coding to work fast and satisfyingly.

But yeah, I'd second tags and comments in NC, if it's feasible. If it's feasible, though, I could see a function to convert Finder tags & comments to NC tags & comments. :)

Re: Add Comments column to allow for comments per file

Posted: Sat Aug 26, 2017 11:39 pm
by JayB
JayB wrote:
Sat Aug 26, 2017 11:26 pm
or create its own xattr, e.g. com.magnumbytes.Comment
To retain Spotlight compatibility, i.e. to be able to mdfind Nimble Commander comments (or tags) outside of NC, they need to have the format com.apple.metadata:<STRING>, e.g. com.apple.metadata:NCcomment or com.apple.metadata:NCtag … but you could also go for a proprietary name, if it's faster, but you'd then lose support in Finder and the shell.

Re: Add Comments column to allow for comments per file

Posted: Thu Sep 07, 2017 9:05 am
by mike
In short.
I have such "additional" properties in mind. They can include many other fields, like Finder's tags, kind of a file (which is determined by macOS), version etc.
The problem is that I didn't figure out how to add support for them without hurting a general performance when this information is not used.
You really don't want to perform an additional I/O per item to get some attribute which might not being shown.
So at the moment this more of a design/architecture question.