custom file open dialog

[aexvir]

describe the solution you'd like not sure how popular my stance is but I really don't like the native macos file dialog I never find my way around it and it takes me much more than what should be needed just to find what I need to open in the end I mostly resort to invoke whatever tool I need from the terminal 😅

I got access to the fleet closed beta quite some time ago and one of the features that surprised me by how well they've implemented it is the open file/folder dialog

it's basically just a filesystem tree embedded on it's own modal window

it might not be perfect, but it works really well for opening the right folder/file directly via keyboard it's closer to the experience of opening files from vim and other terminal based editors, which I personally find really easy to use and agile

small recording about how it works

damn... I just realized how potato this gif looks I'll update with a higher quality example later today

[JosephTLyons]

I'm going to link this issue to this one:

• https://github.com/zed-industries/feedback/issues/77

These issues are different - one is about a custom UI for browsing the system's files and one is about a custom UI for browsing recently viewed projects, but I think it makes sense to connect them since they are in the same ballpark of stuff. I believe the devs have mentioned building some sort of Projects Browser in the past.

[mikayla-maki]

That reminds me of some file browsers I see on Windows 😂. Speaking for myself, i’m always annoyed when people implement their own file browser because I know how to use the mac file browser so well! But I use the mouse pretty heavily and I see what you mean about keyboard based access.

[undersquire]

I think it would be neat to see an option for this that could be toggled.

{
    "use_native_file_dialog": "true",
}

Default option could be false, so the user opts in for the native file dialog.

[exalted]

FWIW, for my very personal needs, OS's default/native file dialog could be the default.

[l0go]

I prefer the official apple one myself, but having a second option is good especially for tiled window managers.

[aexvir]

well... it seems that jetbrains is now providing an option for switching back to the native filepicker on the last fleet version 😅

I guess not enough people sees the value on such feature, although I found interesting the following comment

We cannot open remote file dialogs with a system file dialog. The system doesn't know anything about the place we're running our workspace in. This is in fact why we will always need a custom file dialog

which might be relevant for zed at a future point

[mikayla-maki]

This is why we need Plan 9 😤. Thanks for the research @aexvir, that's a good point!

[iamnbutler]

Yeah, with so much ground to cover + the crazy amount of edge/corner cases there would be to tackle a custom file dialog I doubt this would get touched for years.

Assuming platform support or something in collaboration doesn't lead us to building a custom dialog, I imagine we will use the system one for the foreseeable future.