Hotkeys, hotkeys, hotkeys => F1 Approach

[MartinWegmann]

Hello Midnight Commanders,

when it comes to Norton Commander clones, the biggest problem for me is learning, remembering and quickly using the hotkeys. I'm sure many others feel the same way.

I would be happy if Midnight Commander were the first clone to solve this fundamental problem.

My suggestion would be to implement an F1 approach similar to the one in Visual Studio Code:

1. Press F1.

2. A pop-up menu with the available MC commands is displayed.

   The most recently used commands are listed first.

3. As you type, the commands are filtered.
   Only those that match the characters and words you have entered are displayed.

   The respective keyboard shortcuts are displayed to the right of the command description.

4. Select a command and press Enter. This executes the respective command.

In my opinion and based on my knowledge, this is the most elegant solution to this historical problem.
What do you think?

Thank you,
Martin Wegmann
: )

P.S.
I hope that such a feature could be integrated relatively easily into the MC architecture and implemented on top of it.

[zyv]

We do have context sensitive help that you can start with F1. It's based on the mc man pages. I'm not sure how that would interact with your feature and I don't use VS Code, so I don't really understand what you want. Some screenshots or fake mockups of how it should look in mc would really help.

What you are probably trying to describe is more like a "Search Everywhere" feature from IntelliJ that is started with a double Shift press. I don't have a strong opinion on how useful this would be for mc, but I can't really think of any useful interactions of this feature with filenames in panels and in the editor.

As far as "easy to implement"... that sounds like a huge project to me:

• First, you have to really think it through
• Second, you have to implement it cleanly in plain C
• Third, I'd want to see good tests before anything is merged

Not to discourage you or anyone else thinking about it, but I think it's good to be realistic about the amount of effort it would take to implement and test something like this! If the goal is to have it in the main mc branch, of course.

[MartinWegmann]

Thank you, zyv, for your quick reply and your time.

First of all, I would like to make it clear that I am not complaining about your work on the Midnight Commander. On the contrary, I greatly appreciate the effort, expertise and skill that you have put into implementing the Midnight Commander. Furthermore, I really can't say how much work implementing my suggestion would involve. However, I do believe that the MC architecture would actually suit my suggestion. This is because the MC has obviously been implemented in a command-oriented way.

To illustrate this, I have attached a few screenshots from Visual Studio. My suggestion is not about help (which is already excellent), but about a quick way to enter commands whose keyboard shortcuts a typical user, like me, probably doesn't yet know by heart.

All the best.

P.S.
And yes, the "Search Everywhere" feature from IntelliJ is a bit similar, but it's not strictly related to commands.

Popup after pressing F1 listing the available commands, sorted by recent use.

Typeahead filters the commands:

[zyv]

First of all, I would like to make it clear that I am not complaining about your work on the Midnight Commander. On the contrary, I greatly appreciate the effort, expertise and skill that you have put into implementing the Midnight Commander.

No problem, it's not like I thought you were complaining. Your appreciation is valued. It's just that I don't have the time to write too elaborate replies.

Furthermore, I really can't say how much work implementing my suggestion would involve. However, I do believe that the MC architecture would actually suit my suggestion. This is because the MC has obviously been implemented in a command-oriented way.

I think we have a different understanding of the word "architecture". What I mean is "code structure". What you probably mean is something like "approach to interacting with the user". You used the word " easy" and I wanted to point out that implementation is going to be a hell of a lot of work.

Again, this is not to discourage anyone. It's just that often enough I see the effort dramatically underestimated and that leads to unrealistic expectations.

To illustrate this, I have attached a few screenshots from Visual Studio.

These screenshots are helpful, thanks. So this is actually very similar to IntelliJ's Double Shift. In general I think this is a good idea, this is also a built-in feature to search the menus on macOS, which I really like.

However, I still fail to see how it is suitable in the context of mc.

In fact, we don't have nearly as many possible actions on files (or in general) as VS Code, so this will be quite a short menu. It will also duplicate the button bar at the bottom and the pull-down at the top.

The button bar shows you the available context-dependent F-key meanings, which change dynamically according to what you are doing. The pull-down menu shows (or at least should show) all available commands, and those that have shortcuts also have shortcuts next to them.

So basically, the Double Shift menu will have a dozen useful entries, which makes you seriously wonder if it's worth it.

Maybe this can be extended with the options, and this is where the usefulness would really come from. Unfortunately, we still have some hidden options that are not accessible via TUI, and even those that are accessible are not very obviously organized.

Anyway, I don't think I have much more to add to this discussion. Maybe someone else will be impressed and work out the details so that we can even start talking about the technical side of it.