Suggestion for Fire/Water: Favourite files pane

The projects I’m working on often contain many files; let’s say around 200 of them. Divided over several folders.

The cases I’m working on are deliberately kept as small as possible. Let’s say that the average case involves around 5 files (of the 200) that I need to change.

In VS you often end up with a number of open tabs; some of them in an overflow menu, if there isn’t enough space. I hated that, because it wasn’t clear if f.e. a tab contained a controller file of a class file. Messy.

What I would like to have is a “favourite files” pane. Below you’ll see an example of a project structure. I hope you don’t mind I don’t show 200 example files here … :wink:

|-- Content
|   |
|   |--Html
|         html1.html
|         html2.html *
|         html3.html
|-- Css
|       main.css *
|       custom.css
|-- Classes
        employee.pas
        product.pas *

I marked the files that I want to work with as favourite (*). This could be done in the context menu. If I now open the favourites pane, I see this:

|-- Content
|   |
|   |--Html
|         html2.html
|-- Css
|       main.css
|-- Classes
        product.pas

The files are still shown in their parent folder, so that you can clearly see the file type (eg. is it a controller or a class file).

This way I can quickly navigate between the files I need for the current case I’m working on.

NB: Using the recent files pane, doesn’t work for me because I often open other files (once) just to check something or copy something from it.

1 Like

Note that files should only bubble up in Recents when you touch them (not when you just look at them!)

Yes I know, but I like to have a clean set of work files. And besides that the recent files pane doesn’t show the containing folder, which for me is important.

Or, maybe quicker, double click the file to toggle favorite yes/no. In that case the file should have an indication that it’s a favorite file.

Hmm, so you’d want the favorites view filtered to your favorite files but persisting the folder structure? Right nw the search filter (Fire only for now, so you might not have seen that yet) discards the folder structure to show just the files; personally, I’d probably want a favorites filter to act the same…

Yes.

I’m using Fire and tried the Search pane, but that’s not something that would be the same as what I’m looking for.

In VS you can enter a filter in the solution pane, which then only shows the files matching the search text. Those files are shown together with their containing folder. That’s what I’m looking for, but then in a separate pane and with files marked as favorite (search text won’t work in this context).

Depending on the name convention, you might have two files with the same name; eg. Person. #1 could be a model (in de Models folder) and #2 a view (in the Views folder). When displaying the containing folders, you would make it clear what kind of files they are. Besides that some structure in the favorite pane would make it visually more organized and clearer.

In VS I would open my work files in tabs, so that I can quickly navigate between them.

Two problem there:

  1. Tabs are a messy way to do that. Depending on the length of the filename and the number of open files the tab won’t (always) show the full name, and if there are too many tabes, the rest of them will be visually hidden in a overflow dropdown.
  2. With tabs you don’t see what their containing folder is. Again: this makes it less clear.

So I see the “favorite pane” as a, more clearer / structured, alternative for tabs. You could see them as vertical tabs.

As does Fire. :). Look at the very bottom of the tree.