> Hello!
>
> > Is it reasonable to make ALT('=') do Select All as well? I use it all
> > the time and that triple bucky gets a bit... bothersome.
>
> The code for the file selection keys is messy and needs a serious cleanup.
> Adding new key combination to compensate for brokeness of the existing
> code is hardly reasonable. Additional complexity will be an additional
> obstacle for those who will clean up this code. People learn keys, and
> then you can reassign those keys to something better.
>
> There are several things you can do to make it more convenient for now.
> You can use a terminal that has separate escape sequences for the keypad.
> You can use only_leading_plus_minus. You can even use "Learn keys" to
> assign your favorite combinations.
>
> Have you tried "Learn keys" for that? If yes, why didn't you like this
> approach? I think that the "Learn keys" dialog has two problems - one is
> that users cannot find it when they need it. The other is that they don't
> realize that it can help them.
>
> The answer (hard, but still not ideal) would be to implement remappable
> keys and a to write a much more complex dialog to assign keys to actions
> (as opposed to matching physical keystrokes with escape sequences). This
> would also mean stripping hardcoded keys from the menus, breaking all
> translations. It was discussed many times, but nothing was done.
>
> I think it can be said about the current state of the project that most of
> the simple patches have been applied. The remaining stuff is mostly hard
> and involves redesign. The unfortunate thing is that very few people
> actually want to do the hard stuff. Most contibutors simply try to
> "overstretch" old bad design. Remember e.g. chaining video players with
> the "||" operator, which was an obvious (and wrong) extension of the same
> idea for the Word doc viewers.
>
> > I see that those functions avoid the directories. It's a paltry matter
> > to comment out the lines in cmd.c that check for dirs, but there must be
> > a reason someone did that to begin with.
>
> At least two reasons.
>
> One is that the new dialogs are harder to code than to use input_dialog()
> or other ready dialog. Just a little details - when XView was supported,
> all the dialog had to be created backwards, i.e. starting with the widgets
> that are last in the Tab order. Even the title of the dialog had to be
> drawn manually until recently. Most importantly - the dialog API is
> undocumented.
>
> The other reason is that the selection for directories is in fact
> supported. Just add slash at the end of the pattern. Usability of this
> feature was obviously neglected, so that not only most users are unaware
> of it, but even the developers trying to improve this code!
>
> I cannot apply your patch for two reasons:
>
> 1) It makes it harder to select only files if I want to.
>
> 2) It replaces one random choice with another one instead of giving the
> user the choice (and giving the choice to the user means a checkbox with
> an obvious name, not an extra paragraph in the manual).
>
> > that way you can select all, then reverse the selection to get the
> > directories all selected? Two keystrokes.
>
> Don't you realize that this inconsistency (invert affects directories,
> select doesn't) is just another bug? It's not right, it's just tolerated
> by users, unlike files on ftp beginning with "2000 " :-)
>
> > Usually the subdirs are a minor component of a directory structure, and
> > it's the files you want to work on, usually.
>
> Let the user decide. I'll appreciate if you check popular non-free file
> managers (Far, Norton Commander, Windows Commander) and make the behaviour
> consistent with at least with one of them if possible. At least some
> users won't have to learn news keys when they start using mc.
>
> > Also, the unselect-all SHOULD do directories, shouldn't it. That's what
> > it's for, to unselect everything, isn't it? Right now it won't touch
> > selected directories. Isn't that wrong? If it's not wrong, could
> > someone please explain why?
>
> Maybe because something (just like like you) didn't like writing new
> dialogs?
>
> --
> Regards,
> Pavel Roskin
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