Lars Graugaard

is there a way to display nested folders in umenu? I know we can have nested lists of subfolder content, but that becomes very impractical with several folders w. lots of items...

nested-folders

Some people find the *way* the nested folders are shown (you see the folder, followed by the files in it [e.g. foo, foo/bar.aif, foo/baz.aif]) to be problematic, but are you asking about something *other* than using the depth message to umenu (as shown in the prefix_settings portion of the help file)?

What I want is to have only the icons (w. name) of the subfolders displayed in the umenu drop-down window, so that I don't see their content, just the subfolder symbol. Only when I choose it do I see the content. Makes it possible to hold many more files in the same umenu, as it does not clutter the screen with all the files in all the subfolders.

Why not use the OS browser through [opendialog]? You could then display the folder hierarchy and make use of the OS search functions. You can even send the "types" message to specify which filetypes should be listed.

Lars Graugaard wrote on Thu, 14 May 2009 14:55

Would be nice to have multiple levels in the umenu (pop out the side like the application menus do), but I imagine that would be a serious headache to add to the object. And there are workarounds: have one umemu with just the subfolders, then when you choose it, that prefix goes to another umenu below it (maybe offset to the right like directory trees do). That one you'd use for selecting the actual file, and its contents would swap out as you choose the directories.

Look into the file filtering too, this can be helpful. common: WAVE, AIFF, MooV, PNG, JPEG, PICT, TIFF, TEXT, JSON (maxpat).

You could also try a jit.cellblock for the file names, then use a scrollbar to access long lists. This version would show everything (you can click or use arrows) and you can resize or "collapse" it to hide its contents as desired. You could feed the cellblock the contents from a umenu pretty easily, with a counter and [route populate] for the number of items. With a bigger jit.cellblock, like 4 columns, multiple main folders (umenus for directories at the top) could fill their files into columns. It would take up lots of space but you could hide everything easily, or have it as your own custom file-browser subpatch.

One thing I hadn't noticed until recently is that if you click and release the mouse on the umenu without selecting, you can then use up/down arrows (or the mouse, without dragging) to move around the opened menu, then hit Enter to select and close the list. However, it might be nice to have Tab choose the highlighted one without closing the dropdown list... as of now it closes it without selecting. hmm. am going to put in a feature request, that would be handy.

Lars Graugaard wrote on Thu, 14 May 2009 14:55What I want is to have only the icons (w. name) of the subfolders displayed in the umenu drop-down window, so that I don't see their content, just the subfolder symbol. Only when I choose it do I see the content. Makes it possible to hold many more files in the same umenu, as it does not clutter the screen with all the files in all the subfolders.

One thing I hadn't noticed until recently is that if you click and release the mouse on the umenu without selecting, you can then use up/down arrows (or the mouse, without dragging) to move around the opened menu, then hit Enter to select and close the list. However, it might be nice to have Tab choose the highlighted one without closing the dropdown list... as of now it closes it without selecting. hmm. am going to put in a feature request, that would be handy.


Yes, I am using a similar fix at this moment - we'll just have to let go of this one for the moment...