amake
commented
4 years ago First, thanks very much for the sponsorship, and your words of support elsewhere as well. I really appreciate it.
I have thought about a feature like this, and would like to do something along these lines. However unfortunately it's only straightforward in the trivial case, which would be much less useful for your use case.
The bad news
The core problem is that due to security restrictions, I currently can't access files "in-place". As you probably know, iOS and Android apps are sandboxed and don't have easy raw access to the filesystem. Almost every way you get files into the app is really copying behind the scenes (and then I delete after loading the content).
So it's easy to have a list of recently opened files, but those files will be frozen at the point of time that you opened them. Since your use case (and mine) is to continue to edit the files over time on another machine, this option is not that appealing.
Good news 1
On iOS I did implement support for reading a file in-place with NSFileCoordinator. This lets the iOS share sheet say "Open in Orgro" instead of "Copy to Orgro", and is generally more useful for apps that can also edit files. I just discovered that it seems you can bookmark these URLs for later access, so it could be possible to implement your request based on this, for files opened via the iOS share sheet.
For Android it seems there is an equivalent capability with the ACTION_OPEN_DOCUMENT intent and ContentResolver#takePersistableUriPermission.
For the Open File button I am using the Flutter file_picker plugin, and this can only copy files into the app. They are working on support for persistent in-place access, but it seems to be a long way away. In the meantime someone else has made another plugin, file_picker_writable, which seems to offer the required data.
Implementing this is probably a several-week project based on my impression of the complexity and the amount of time I have to work on it (Orgro is my fun project I work on in the evenings when my kids are finally in bed).
Good news 2
You can already sort of do what you want with a few caveats:
- The file picker that opens with the Open File button remembers your last visited folder, so if your most-opened files are in the same folder you should have relatively easy access to them with just one extra tap (the Open File button) and maybe a little scrolling
- If you're mostly opening the same files, they should all fit in the Recents tab even if they live in different folders. That's at most another extra tap away.
Questions
So I have a better idea of your situation, can you tell me:
- What kind of iOS device do you use?
- What iOS version are you running?
- How do you access your org files on your iOS device? (for instance I use the Google Drive app)
marcus-crane
I think one thing that would improve Orgro is a list of recently opened files, say the last 5 or 10?
Perhaps some weight based system so it's the most commonly visited files plus the most recent file?
As an an example of my use case, I have a
cookbook.orgfile that I store recipes in, and I tend to open it commonly on my phone. Ditto for my monthly journal as well.I suppose the possible trickiness may come in making sure that references are updated for moved files, and deleted files are able to be removed from the recents list!
Unfortunately I don't know Dart at all, so I'm not able to even attempt to try and contribute this myself but I've opted to become a Github sponsor since I'd like to see Orgro able to grow :)