Drawers

How to make drawer display contents of a folder and how to make it disappear when focus is lost?

Asked by k65

Hello,

So far I really like Drawers and I think it will become a widely used feature on Ubuntu. There are however, two things that I think would make it THE killer app (at least for me.. :) ).

1) I have one or two folders which I access really often (when I'm working on a specifc project for example). Therefore I would like the drawer to be able to display the _contents_ of a folder, rather than providing a quicklink to the folder.
2) When I open a drawer I often don't click anything in it anyway and move away to another program again (I'm kinda messy). So when I click to open the drawer it opens as expected, but when I then click another program (outside the drawer) the drawer remains opened. What I would like for it to do is to disappear when the focus is lost.

Would any of these features be possible to be implemented?

I've recently learned how to work in Python. Although I haven't done any GUI programming so far I would possibly be able to help out as well. If you could give any tips on where to start with eitherone of these two features I would love to look at it and see if I am able to help out.. :)

Regards

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icb410 (ian-berke) said : 		#1

Hi,

Drawers is really set up as a quick convenience to keep disparate items in one place (such as for files in different locations that relate to one project, or a group of applications in a certain category). Adding full file-browsing features to it is a little beyond its scope.

The close on loss of focus feature has been mentioned by others, but would cause issues with drag-n-drop features on an open drawer. It might be possible to disable a "close on loss of focus" by pinning the window and thereby allowing drag-n-drop. I'll look into coding a configurable feature, because I can see some people really not liking it. I created a wishlist request in the bug section for drawers (bug #1087433)

Thanks for your feedback,
Ian

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icb410 (ian-berke) said : 		#2

Hi,

Drawers will be releasing with a new feature (Active Drawers) that will allow a drawer to display the contents of a folder and keep a quicklist of the 10 most recent items + any that are pinned to it. Look for the release within the next 1-2weeks, or try out the daily build at my testing ppa: ppa:ian-berke/testing

Best,
Ian

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