build 1905 - the new UI

[mike]

Dears friends,

I've been working on new NC's interface backbone for 2+ months and finally there's something to show to you.
First of all - this time current preview build is really a preview, i.e. some parts are lacking, some may be buggy and others might be forgotten at all. About ~150Kb of source code was thrown away and another ~200Kb was written to replace it, and such changes can't go absolutely smoothly.
Nevertheless, it's a very good opportunity to change something now, while this new codebase is not finalized, and some external sight might show some unexpected aspects of undergoing changes.

So, what is new:
- File panels UI is now fully based on system components, i.e. they have scrollbars, they are full of layer-backed views blah-blah-blah.
The most sensitive point here is overall UI performance and responsiveness, it'll be great to hear about your experience - is it enough or UI deserves a further optimization?
- Page Up / Page Down now actually scrolls the panel view, not moving the cursor inside it.
- New concept of customizable layouts. Previously there were 4 hardcoded of them, now there're up to 10 layouts that can be tuned for your needs.
Settings are located at Preferences->Panels->Layouts, currently there're not many of them, but I will add them gradually.
Now there're 2 main layout types - Brief and List, and Thumbnails type will be added later.
And yes, there's a dynamic columns width mode for Brief layout.
- Date Added file attribute, can be used for sorting too.
- Sorting indicator in Panel Header now is actually a button, which brings a popup menu with sorting options.
- Quick Search now underscores query matches in filenames.
- Panel Footer now includes an info about available space on current volume and shows total amount of items in panel.

Now, what is missing:
- Drag&drop.
- Colors/fonts customization, classic mode. It's a next big task - to write a new centralized themes config.

So, if you want to try the current results and then to throw some tomatoes towards my side - you are welcome
Here's the build: http://magnumbytes.com/downloads/previe ... (1905).zip
(It might be a good idea to copy/backup your current config, to rollback to stable build without any surprises)

Regards,
Mike.

[d0ublezer0]

Yeah! Cool!
F11 - copies current filename/dir
but not copy marked list of files. only file under cursor

[d0ublezer0]

In-place renaming (I use Shift + F6) in a brief (ˆ+1) and brief dynamic (ˆ+2) layouts does not allow to complete the operation.
When I release the Shift, editing is canceled.
In the full layout is no such problem.

[mike]

Hi, d0ublezer0!

F11 - copies current filename/dir
but not copy marked list of files. only file under cursor

You mean this issue http://magnumbytes.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=162? I haven't add it yet...

In-place renaming (I use Shift + F6) in a brief (ˆ+1) and brief dynamic (ˆ+2) layouts does not allow to complete the operation.
When I release the Shift, editing is canceled.
In the full layout is no such problem.

Huh, interesting one, thanks for pointing to it.

[darek]

Mike, my 2 cents:

* Love the new dynamic brief mode! Just what I needed.

* Judging from a couple of minutes of usage, the performance seems good.

> Page Up / Page Down now actually scrolls the panel view, not moving the cursor inside it

* And this is one of the EVIL things macOS does. Why on earth page up/down wouldn't move the cursor? Like in Xcode, I page down a dozen of times, finally find my line, try to position the cursor for editing, and BOOM, I'm at the top of the file again. What were those people thinking? AARGH! Fortunately you can change this setting in Xcode, but you can't in Finder. And many other apps. Makes me appreciate Windows each time I switch machines

[mike]

> Page Up / Page Down now actually scrolls the panel view, not moving the cursor inside it
And this is one of the EVIL things macOS does. Why on earth page up/down wouldn't move the cursor? Like in Xcode, I page down a dozen of times, finally find my line, try to position the cursor for editing, and BOOM, I'm at the top of the file again. What were those people thinking? AARGH! Fortunately you can change this setting in Xcode, but you can't in Finder. And many other apps. Makes me appreciate Windows each time I switch machines

This is interesting, since I wrote this behavior manually to emulate the default system behavior
I.e. NC now catches PgUp/PgDn key press, understands which command it is and then process it by adjusting scrollviews.
I changed this action since a lot of people wonders why NC does something strange on that keys.
However, I never knew before about Xcode's approach to differentiate this into to commands - "Move Page" and "Scroll Page", and I think this might fit well into NC's UI.
Like PageUp/PageDown to "scroll page" and Alt+PageUp/Alt+PageDown to "move page".

[mike]

In-place renaming (I use Shift + F6) in a brief (ˆ+1) and brief dynamic (ˆ+2) layouts does not allow to complete the operation.
When I release the Shift, editing is canceled.
In the full layout is no such problem.

Tried to reproduce this behavior, seem to work ok in my setup - releasing/hitting shift doesn't affect field editor.

[darek]

Yeah, in my mind there's absolutely no reason for scrolling the view without moving the cursor. I tried very hard to see why Apple went that way, but the only reasonable conclusion was that they were smoking something strong while dancing around the bonfire... and then sat down to design the UI

In general macOS is inferior to Windows when it comes to keyboard usage, but this thing takes the cake, hands down. It could have been worse though... They say Jobs once had idea to remove arrow keys in favor of using mouse to position the cursor. Which confirms my bonfire theory above

Fortunately the new wave of (cross platform) software on Mac seems to follow the sane pattern. Sublime Text, Visual Studio Code, even that one other commander -- they all move cursor on page up/dn.

Finder could catch up eventually. After all, it got the option to sort directories on top recently! There's hope But on the other hand, most Apple software does this thing you mentioned, where page up doesn't move the cursor, but alt+page up does. Which is a crappy solution (this should be reverted) but Finder doesn't follow even that. Rogue one!