Directory and File Explorer

Please do not email me about this project without reading the disclaimer above.

Introduction

• It has hundreds of quick viewers for many file types so you don’t need to launch an application just get a rough look at a file. The quick viewers don’t allow edit, just viewing and scrolling and text search.
• You can rapidly navigate to spots on your disk in your favourites list, just like a browser, with bookmarks. There are three bookmark icons called source, target and place. You can assign them to directories or files or places in files with a single right click to say from now on, until I tell you otherwise, this button means jump here The three buttons are always accessible so you can jump to those places. The source and target bookmarks act as default directories for any copy or move operations. There are also some long term bookmarks with assignable icons, that can’t be quite so casually reassigned. Perhaps two clicks.
• There is a history stack of places you have visited, (not usually counting places just passed through).
• It indexes file content for rapid searching much the way Magellan did. You can give a search expression of file names, wildcards, extensions and content words you want to see, and bang, there is a list of files matching that criteria. Hitting Down Arrow lets you view the contents of each matching file in turn.
• You can navigate to a directory by typing part of the name, and selecting from potential matches.
• Different parts of your disk can have a different decor. That helps orient you, especially when there are similarly named files and directories on your disk. You customise directory trees with background wallpaper, colour schemes, icons.
• There is a history stack of where you have been, so you can always get back to where you just were, even if you have closed that window.
• If you are feeling very clever, try to make everything undoable.

Implementation

Quick Viewers implement an interface, and can be dynamically loaded. Slow viewers actually launch an app via exec. Each app has to be configured with exactly what that command looks like under each OS (Operating System). Users can write their own viewers to plug in for their own file formats. You might look at how the old Magellan interface worked to get an idea how to design a high performance viewer. It had file format reconinizers, scolling viewers and indexers. You might support a JDisplay-style interface that supplies tokens to render, only computing them if the user scrolls down far enough. That would give you colourised Java, HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) etc which is easier to understand.

You might tackle a stripped down version of this project. You feed it the program directory name or list of directory names. With a single click of up or down arrow you can view the previous or next document in the directory. By hitting Del you can delete a document. It only works on text documents. It displays the first page of the document, the date, size, and filename. You might optionally implement Page Down, Page Up. Even this mini-version would be very useful for rapidly pruning your disks of old junk.

For a more challenging project thing about how you could create tools to rapidly compare files in two directories, letting you see at a glance which files are in one directory but note the other, common to both, bigger, newer, and where matching files differ.

SUBST

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