Media/File Browser

Multiple features require some way of selecting files to be used as input. There is a limited browser that covers the ‘shared resources’ namespace. It can be accessed via the global/open/browse path.

It is still quite primitive, and only offers limited preview of image resources, and therefore currently only accept a preset list of hardcoded extensions that are defined in the durden/menus/global/open.lua file.

browser

You navigate by typing or using the left/right/up/down bindings to move the selected item, and use the select (enter) binding to activate.

Holding meta1 while activating a resource will spawn the resource in the background while keeping the menu active.

Preview Controls

Via get global/settings/browser a number of preview controls are exposed. The ones currently available are:

  • Preview (image, all or none) changes the types that will be previewed
  • Timer controls how much time that should be elapsed before the preview is activated
  • Position controls video preview starting position
  • Trigger (selection, visibility) controls if preview should be triggered by selection or as soon as a label is visible

Special Paths

Holding meta1 while pressing ESCAPE will have you go up one level in the tree, but typing “..” also works.

The root can be reached by entering “/”, and the current directory can be refreshed by typing “.”.

You can either use lua patterns as a filter by prefixing with “%%”, or use asterisks as normal wildcard matching.

By typing a single ‘%’, you get access to options that can change the sorting order.

Future Changes

  • Asynchronous globbing (engine issue)
  • Allow adding files to a stack than can be atomically packed/deleted/forwarded/transformed/queued for ‘playlist’
  • Toggle file details on/off
  • Map client bchunk- hint events to spawn browser for universal open/save file-picking
  • Selectable namespace (global or appl-)
  • Extend menu bindings to cover browser paths