Add an option to show both files and folders but search only folders

[kovdan01]

Since tere is used to browse the filesystem fast and not to open files, searching for files is not very useful (we can't chdir into a file :) ). There is already an option --folders-only, but it disables not only search through files but there display as well. Having files displayed makes sense as for me: for example, you don't need to run ls after exiting from tere to see what's inside the folder.

Having a special mode where files are displayed but not searched would give the best of two existing options: both seeing everything immediately and rapid browsing the filesystem without files being treated as potential chdir targets.

[mgunyho]

Hi, thanks for the suggestion!

This sounds like a decent addition, and it should not conflict too badly with an xdg-open-like use-case such as in #38, if that's ever implemented.

What could be an easy-to-understand --option-name for this? The existing -d/--folders-only and -D/--no-folders-only are a bit hard to extend to this. One possibility is to deprecate -d and -D and use a three-way option instead, like --files <'select', 'ignore' or 'hide'>, as the sorting mode is now.

I might implement this but I don't have much time in the near future. A PR is welcome.

[mgunyho]

Hmm on further thought, maybe the default behavior should be to just not select files when searching, since tere can't do anything with them for now anyway. An --option for allowing file selection could be added later.

[mgunyho]

Okay this turned out to be trivial to implement: https://github.com/mgunyho/tere/commit/35fee62129a3deeca8e9a908584a0f784c0b0924.

I'll probably make this the default behavior, but I would like to add an option for enabling searching for files as well.

One use case I can think of is that one wants to check if a folder contains some files, e.g. with the filter-search mode. So similarly to your case of not wanting to do ls after entering a folder, one might want to search for some file within a folder, and decide based on that if this was the folder they wanted or not.

[kovdan01]

Thanks @mgunyho!

What could be an easy-to-understand --option-name for this? The existing -d/--folders-only and -D/--no-folders-only are a bit hard to extend to this. One possibility is to deprecate -d and -D and use a three-way option instead, like --files <'select', 'ignore' or 'hide'>, as the sorting mode is now.

A three-way option looks best as for me. A separate --option-name might be a bit confusing since combination of "folders-only" and "search-both-files-and-dirs" makes no sense, and only 3 combinations out of 4 in this 2x2 matrix are intended to be used.

However, if a three-way option is harder to implement for some reason, a separate option also looks quite well. The names might be like --search-folders-only and --no-search-folders-only. I'm not very good in nice names, but these at least look consistent with existing --folders-only and --no-folders-only.

[mgunyho]

A separate --option-name might be a bit confusing since combination of "folders-only" and "search-both-files-and-dirs" makes no sense, and only 3 combinations out of 4 in this 2x2 matrix are intended to be used.

I was thinking of it as a third option that would override both --folders-only and --no-folders-only, like how the case-sensitivity has three options, --case-sensitive, --ignore-case and --smart-case, so we only have 3 options and not 2x2. It's just hard to come up with a name to complement "folders only" and "no folders only". It feels to me that it should be something like "hide files", "ignore files" and "allow both files and folders".

[kovdan01]

Ah, I got your point now. I agree that it's hard to come up with a nice complement to 2 existing option names, and I was unable to do that in a reasonable time as well. I'll let you know if something comes to my mind, but I suppose it's unlikely to happen.

[mgunyho]

Thanks for taking the time to think about it! I also tried to think of a reasonable option, but I also came to the conclusion that the three-way option is better. I'm currently working on implementing it with --files ignore|hide|match.

[mgunyho]

It took a while, but this is now implemented by #88. I will make a new release with this feature soon.

I went with --files ignore|hide|match, with the short version -l (I initially wanted to use -d, but it was tricky to re-use an existing shorthand without causing compatibility issues).

[kovdan01]

Thanks!