[Feature request]: Better GUI element for file selection

[akaihola]

Issue

[Update: I'm working on this in my branch akaihola/aider@file-tree-select. I'll only create a PR if someone gives me green light and I've solved the widget initialization problem – see comments below.]

The "Add files to the chat" UI element in aider --gui shows all repository files in a multi-select drop-down box. Only 7 files are visible at once, so with a large repository there's a lot of scrolling.

Could e.g. the streamlit_tree_select extension be used to get a more usable user experience?

tree-select 2024-08-06.webm

Version and model info

Aider v0.47.2-dev

[akaihola]

I added a screencast of the widget in action.

There are two issues:

• For deep hierarchies, a too narrow sidebar messes up the layout inside the tree widget. Widening the sidebar is a work-around.
• Importing of aider.gui in aider/main.py prevented tree-select from working at all. I replaced the import with importlib.util.find_spec since only the path to the module is needed.

[akaihola]

Update: I rebased on current main and everything seems to still work.