Folder preview

[adyanth]

When previewing a folder, it is way better to show contents of the folder along with those macOS like folder dropdown (with a triangle to click to expand the folders) rather than showing the last modified which is almost useless information.

Seer does this as well, but well, it is paid.

[xupefei]

It is actually quite easy to write a plugin for previewing folders based on existing codes of the ArchiveViewer, but unfortunately no one want to contribute...

[rabelux]

Duplicate of #491

[mooflu]

I took a stab at it here: master...mooflu:origin

Not sure I like it. Maybe useful when scanning a bunch of items/folders.
For the single case it's not really any better than opening folder in explorer.

Maybe if it was more like OSX stacks grid and the QL window opened up near the folder as a way to quickly access an item and QL window closes once you open/select an item.

[adyanth]

It is helpful since 1. Quicklook opens faster/smoother than explorer 2. When you want to open a deeply nested file/folder, double clicking 10 times is a pain, and you cannot see the contents of the previous folder at the same time.

@xupefei Do you have a README for the build so I can try it out (New to C# and windows app dev in general here 😅)? Or if you can build a nightly by taking a pull request from @mooflu here?

[adyanth]

It is working great!
I forked this and added mooflu's branch here and saw that you have appveyor setup, so made a free account and here is the build artifacts.

One small issue I noticed, the files don't show their icons, which I can confirm even the Archive Previewer does not. So, this is looking damn good! Thanks @mooflu and @xupefei please check if this can be added as a core functionality in the next release 🥳

[adyanth]

Can you think of a way to open the folder on double click or maybe enter? This is helpful if you have already gone down the rabbit hole of folders and want to open one of those in explorer. I see that the double click it tied to opening the top folder, and there are global hooks to Enter. Maybe a possibility of a right click?

[xupefei]

@mooflu Great work and thanks for @adyanth's build 👍
Minor comments:

• When previewing a Drive (e.g. C:\) the counting is very slow. Maybe to ignore Drives in the Plugin interface (return false when Path.GetPathRoot(path) == path)?
• I suggest to move the plugin to a standalone repo forked from https://github.com/QL-Win/QuickLook.Plugin.HelloWorld. This allows further dead code removal (remove codes only used in the ArchiveViewer) and a standalone distribution of this new plugin.

the files don't show their icons

The ArchiveViewer is designed to show the default icon of each file type since getting the real icon needs to decompress files. For this new plugin, it is possible to get real icons at the cost of delaying loading speed, unless icons are shown in a async way.

[adyanth]

It is reasonably fast (~1-2s) on my D: drive which is larger and containing more data than C: but yes, very slow on C: due to the sheer count of files there. Yeah, stopping it for root filesystems would help.

I will try my hands on C# dev with this then, will try to create a module from hello world. (Not sure how forking that is useful, but will use it as a template)

Also, I thought that the folder preview would kind of be like the core, but yeah, a standalone plugin is good as well!

[mooflu]

A folder-preview plugin sounds right. Not sure if an external plugin makes debugging harder - it was nice to run the whole thing in debug mode. I guess that's mostly bundling and I could keep a branch with the new plugin inside the main project.

Re: opening folder in explorer.
It currently saves the full path only for files and the click handler checks if a file exists before it opens it.
So it should be easy to allow folders: add full path for folders and remove file check since we know it exists.
Default for double click is to open the tippy, so it may be a bit surprising when it opens the folder externally.
Probably ok, though, since you can still open by clicking the tippy icon or right arrow via keyboard.

Re: folder scan
It would be better if it dynamically loaded as you tippy open a folder - no overall stats, though.

[xupefei]

Not sure if an external plugin makes debugging harder - it was nice to run the whole thing in debug mode

Debugging a plugin is not harder:

1. Set the plugin build path to Debug\QuickLook.Plugins\QuickLook.Plugin.FolderViewer\ (to maintain the dir structure -- QL loads plugins from this folder).
2. Copy a QuickLook executable (with dependencies) to Debug\.
3. In plugin debugging tab, set executable to Debug\QuickLook.exe.
4. Start a debugging. VS will attach to QuickLook.exe and pause at any breakpoint in the plugin code.

[mooflu]

I've made some of the suggested changes.

• FolderViewer as its own plugin
• no preview when it's the root
• double click on folder opens it in explorer
• use "real icons"

WIP here: https://github.com/mooflu/QuickLook/tree/folder-preview/QuickLook.Plugin/QuickLook.Plugin.FolderViewer