wtfutil / wtf

The personal information dashboard for your terminal
http://wtfutil.com
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Allow multiple widgets to be displayed in the same area #1093

Closed flw-cn closed 2 years ago

flw-cn commented 3 years ago

What should it do?

Multiple widgets can be swapped automatically between each other or with shortcut keys. Just like textfile does. The widgets can be of any existing type.

My real scenario was that I wanted to view multiple text files via tail -f, which also allowed wtfutil to be integrated into my tmux, along with other applications, to make up my final UI.

Since screen space is limited, I prefer to display multiple logs reflecting different content separately, and just press a shortcut when I need to view another one.

senorprogrammer commented 3 years ago

I'm not understanding something about the problem you're describing. You're using tail -f to follow multiple text files - are you viewing those in WTF via the command runner module? Or via the textfile module?

flw-cn commented 3 years ago

For example, if I have two text files of similar nature, I can use the same textfile to view them in order to save screen space, and when I need to switch, I just focus on the textfile and press the shortcut key.

However, if I have two log files of similar nature, I can monitor its changes with tail -f, but I can't put them in the same area (as textfile does), which means that it takes up double the screen space. Well, if it's three files then it will take up three times the screen space, etc.

The reason why textfile can support viewing multiple files at the same time is that it provides this feature itself. But I was wondering if it would be possible to make "displaying the content of multiple widgets in one area" a feature that would be available to all widgets.

To do this, we might need to have a container-like widget that allows multiple parallel widgets to be placed in it, forming a hierarchy, and then a shortcut in the container to toggle which widget is visible and which other widgets are hidden at the same time. Of course, it can also be made to switch automatically at intervals (like some of the dashboards you see in life).

Anyway, thanks for listening to my suggestion and for tagging it.

senorprogrammer commented 3 years ago

That's an interesting idea, I'd never thought of that. I suspect that would require an overhaul of the config system (not necessarily a bad thing). I'm going to think about this some more.

stale[bot] commented 2 years ago

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.