Annoying and very "windows-ish" filesystem navigation

Help, Support & Bugs
1

Hello, i haven’t posted here for a while. I find the navigation of instruments, samples, and modules really annoying in renoise, for several reasons:

  • Symlinks are ignored: this is MAJORLY annoying. Granted, it’s not often you have many symlinks directly to module or inst/sample files, but there’s no way (other than manually editing the config files) for ex. to use a symlink “renoise” that points to “rns_whatever_version” and therefore i have to update all my “favorites” paths each time i install a new version. I usually just use sed command / regexp on my config files, but it’s still very annoying and makes renoise feel like a “cheap ho”.

  • Can’t type a path directly, even without tab completion. ie let’s say i know i want to go to /usr/track or /usr/track/samples, it’s much quicker to just type that (about 1 to 1.5 second) than futz around with the mouse trying to incrementally find each successive entry in the list (10 to 20 seconds) - especially when these lists contains hundreds or thousands of items, that are sorted in some weird manner (.xrns first, alphabetical, then .it alphabetical and so on)

  • Can’t see current path for modules, instruments, samples: pretty much the same as the previous point. I just see i’m in directory “renoise” - but i have at least 4 or 5 directories named “renoise” on my filesystem in which what i’m looking for (or where i want to save) might be located.

  • This is a relatively minor one, but selection buffer / middle-click to paste doesn’t work to/from any text-entry in renoise, including filename or dir/path boxes. To copy/paste, i need to use the mac/windows “1. select, 2. copy, 3. click dest, 4. paste” method which overwrites whatever i have in my copy/paste clipboard, and is also slower.

So, my suggestion (actually i’d consider this a bug report) is to make the file management/navigation so that i don’t need to have a term window or sometimes 2 open, and always compensate for every aspect of renoise’s interaction with my filesystem being limited to the microsoft-imposed, childish and inefficient way of thinking of (and using) computers.

2

In the Disk Browser, you should be able to edit the path directly by clicking on it, like so:

rns-file-path
rns-file-path715×244 7.61 KB

3

“Like a cheap ho” :joy: also there is an extra dir list below the field dblue mentioned, it is just minimized by default (didn’t know that for the last 10 years)

4

:open_mouth:

1 Like
5

Ok, since this topic now was opened, I add these points:

  • Sorting by date also for directories would be helpful + in that extra directory list, too.

  • If the filename is too long, it appears in full length in the tooltip. But if you then move the pointer over a name which was not too long, the tooltip disappears. The next entry though may be too long again. So moving the mouse after first tooltip appearance is a bit annoying. Why not let the tooltip stay also on not too long entries?

  • The actual filedate, time in the tooltip would be helpful, too.

  • I know this won’t be added, but I normally use the macos finder’s tags (I tag quality and “idea” and so on). If that was supported at least in the native file dialogs (you can extend those dialogues with the common system tag tools or so, but the api for tags is quite frustrating, you have to parse the system config file or so). So then even a file rewrite which was tagged before would not delete set tags.