Add multiple books to library at once

[crimsonfall]

Currently the only way to add a book (.epub file) to your personal Foliate library is to open them, however you can only do so one-at-a-time (there's no way to select multiple books at once). This makes it frustrating if, for example, you already have a sizeable collection of ebooks you want to transfer over to Foliate, but would have to spend a considerable amount of time adding each book to your library. In previous versions of Foliate, you were able add multiple books to your library at once.

A solution to this issue would be of course to simply have a feature where you can add multiple ebooks (.epub files or other formats) to your library at once without opening them all. Perhaps a simple ‘Add’ or ‘+’ button would suffice, which upon pressing it, would open your file manager and allow you to select your ebook(s).

Edit: I forgot to mention earlier, but I think adding the ability to also remove multiple books from a library at once would also be nice.

(Congratulations on your app rewrite by the way, it looks and functions far better than before!)

[jaybent]

Workaround: find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 -I {} bash -c 'foliate "{}" & sleep 1' && sleep 10 && killall foliate

Explanation: This workaround allows opens multiple files with foliate and then close all instances of foliate at once, effectively bulk adding all files under current path (recursively).

1. find . -print0 recursively finds all files from the current directory (the period), printing them separated by null characters.
2. xargs -0 -I {} bash -c 'foliate "{}" & sleep 1' uses xargs to pass each found item to the bash command:
   • foliate "{}" opens the file with foliate and runs it in the background.
   • sleep 1 gives a brief pause to ensure the GUI window has time to load for each instance.
3. && sleep 10 waits for 10 seconds after all instances have been started, giving them time to fully load.
4. killall foliate terminates all instances of foliate at once.

Caveat: The sleep timers (sleep 1 and sleep 10) might need to be tweaked depending on your system and/or disk speed to ensure all windows have time to open properly, and for foliate to write all required files before being closed.

This assumes all files under current path are e-books, it is undefined what happens if any other files exists. Modify the find command if this is a problem, example: find . -type f -iname *.pdf -print0 will only match files with names ending in .pdf, likely being PDFs.

Warning: This command will open all files found, it could potentially consume a huge amount of RAM and crash the system if there is a lot of files or they are large.