"Ungrouping" several opened files

[humdinger]

This is hrev32111.

A while back, Jonas had a nice ​idea to deal with an annoyance when opening a selection of files:

If you open a selection of files you often end up with one window for every file. There are a few cases, where it's preferrable to have all in one window and an option to "ungroup" those files into multiple windows. I suggest a menu item "Ungroup files - ALT+U". It may be prudent to have the operation abortable (with "ESC"?) in case of an accidental ungrouping (think of opening 50 RAW images...).

Here are the apps I (or Jonas in his post) can think of:

• Get Info panel: normally show one summary panel for all selected files. (while at it, have ALT+Q close all open info panels...)
• FileType Add-On: already combines multiple files in one panel. ALT+U could seperate those into several panels by filetype if they are not all the same.
• Showimage: normally put all selected files into a slideshow.
• MediaPlayer: normally put all selected files into a playlist.
• ...are there more?

[jonas.kirilla]

I agree with the proposal in general, but I will focus on the MediaPlayer/ShowImage case in this comment since I found Tracker a bit curious here. Take a look at how Tracker opens a selection of multiple files:

1. Select 10 audio files that would normally open in MediaPlayer and open them by doing Command-A, Command-O. This will open 10 MediaPlayer windows.

2. Select the same 10 audio files and open them using "Open With > MediaPlayer". This will open a single MediaPlayer with a playlist of the 10 files.

(I don't know if this applies to all view modes - I don't remember if it was the list view or the icon view I tried.)

I'm guessing that Tracker send 10 messages with a single entry in case 1, but one message with 10 entries in the second case.

Tracker's "Command-O" should take a hint from "Open with". That should make it easier for ShowImage or MediaPlayer to decide (for themselves) when to open a slideshow or playlist and when to open multiple window. If Tracker does not pass along the user's intent to open a set of files as an actual set, the receiving application can only guess the user's intent.

I'm not saying always/blindly stuff all selection in a single BMessage - there can be different filetypes or files having a preferred application attribute set.

[jstressman]

Adding myself to this one as I was bitten by this when I selected a large number of files and tried to "Get info" to see the total file size of all the selected files. :(

hrev44404 gcc2h

[pulkomandy]

There is a trap here: when you select "open with", you are always opening a single application. When you use cmd+O, there may be different apps to open for each file. So, Tracker should:

• Get the preferred app for each file
• Group the files by preferred app
• Open each app once and send the group of files to it in one go

So if you select a mix of pictures and videos (typical set of files from a digital camera), you'd get both ShowImage and MediaPlayer open, and the slideshow and video playlist starting to run at the same time. Better than opening a hundred windows, but still not perfect.

[waddlesplash]

Reverting earlier milestone change