Re: Several suggestions to the author
Duplicate post:
https://winscp.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=23380
https://winscp.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=23380
- martin
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Topic review
- Yang Dong
Several suggestions to the author
As a steady WinSCP user, I've been using this great tool for years. The tool greatly improves efficiency our operations against Linux. However for long time I've not got the chance to submit some paint points to the developer of this tool, till recently. Here I'd like to list them all in this post.
1. I suggest the filter feature for the remote/local file list is better to be an editor(commbo box) directly residing in the tool bar, rather than as a button and a dialog box. In this way, one can much directly input a filter, or even directly select a history filter in the dropdown.
2. There should be some place to see and manage what files are being edited by external editors. As I guess, WinSCP may start an internal thread to monitor the update timestamp of each of these files. But the problems is, sometimes WinSCP has no way to know whether the external editors have finished the editing of those files, since for some multi-file editors such as Eclipse, when user closed the file in the editor, it's very likely they don't close the editor itself, they may retain the editor for some other works, thus the monitoring thread in WinSCP will be always alive, and the temp files are always there. So it's useful for WinSCP to provide a management UI to maintain these in-editing files, to allow users manually to clean up the files that have already been finished editing(both to release the monitoring threads and to clean up the temporary files).
3. There should be some way to make us able to open a batch of files in one time. For example, I have about 10 shell scripts located in different places in a Linux server. Ordinarily for the first time I need to edit them,I can navigate to the file and open them in an external editor from WinSCP, and even if I've opened multiple files, it works fine. However, If I always need to open the same set of files for certain work, then each time I will need to navigate to each of these files and open them again. So I hope WinSCP can have a functionality that we can open multiple files in external editor via a path list(or a wildcard list) in one time without navigating, or even better, let WinSCP be able to 'remember' the editing state, so that the next time I opened WinSCP again, I can still continue to edit the temporary files from last time. I think this may bring great convenience to those script developers with Linux.
There 3 suggestions are long time pain point to me, hopes to be considered in WinSCP's future versions.
Thanks!
1. I suggest the filter feature for the remote/local file list is better to be an editor(commbo box) directly residing in the tool bar, rather than as a button and a dialog box. In this way, one can much directly input a filter, or even directly select a history filter in the dropdown.
2. There should be some place to see and manage what files are being edited by external editors. As I guess, WinSCP may start an internal thread to monitor the update timestamp of each of these files. But the problems is, sometimes WinSCP has no way to know whether the external editors have finished the editing of those files, since for some multi-file editors such as Eclipse, when user closed the file in the editor, it's very likely they don't close the editor itself, they may retain the editor for some other works, thus the monitoring thread in WinSCP will be always alive, and the temp files are always there. So it's useful for WinSCP to provide a management UI to maintain these in-editing files, to allow users manually to clean up the files that have already been finished editing(both to release the monitoring threads and to clean up the temporary files).
3. There should be some way to make us able to open a batch of files in one time. For example, I have about 10 shell scripts located in different places in a Linux server. Ordinarily for the first time I need to edit them,I can navigate to the file and open them in an external editor from WinSCP, and even if I've opened multiple files, it works fine. However, If I always need to open the same set of files for certain work, then each time I will need to navigate to each of these files and open them again. So I hope WinSCP can have a functionality that we can open multiple files in external editor via a path list(or a wildcard list) in one time without navigating, or even better, let WinSCP be able to 'remember' the editing state, so that the next time I opened WinSCP again, I can still continue to edit the temporary files from last time. I think this may bring great convenience to those script developers with Linux.
There 3 suggestions are long time pain point to me, hopes to be considered in WinSCP's future versions.
Thanks!