File listing inside WinSCP

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JamesBurke
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File listing inside WinSCP

WinSCP shows the full file type for all files which takes up vast amounts of screen space, e.g: instead of: Type= "jpg file", WinSCP displays: type= "Joint Photographic Experts File" which takes up a huge amount of screen space I could use to display other parameters. Just "jpg file" is all I need to see.

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JamesJoseph
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Re: File listing inside WinSCP

Thanks for the reply. The column is sometimes useful, but the long file type names is sort of overdoing the "usefulness", so I was looking for a way to simplify the display. Maybe a miracle will happen.

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FeRDNYC
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Sorting by file type comes to mind, offhand. Which is often useful for selecting all files of a certain type, because it groups them together.

Yes, you can use the option to select all files with a certain extension, but that may be a subtly different thing. Consider, for example, a directory containing both .jpg and .jpeg files.

(Then again, on my Win10 system those are shown with the type "JPG File" and "JPEG File", respectively, because I guess I haven't installed any software that sets descriptive names for those types. Though in theory, if I had, they'd both presumably be "Joint Photographic Experts Group File"s. But that's also partly the point – it's not like WinSCP controls those names. They're defined at the Windows level by applications that support a particular file type. The name can also be edited in the Registry, for the really determined.)

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FeRDNYC
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@martin: Right, but like I said, that can be a subtly different thing.

It's tricky because Windows types tend to be so detailed/specific, which ironically makes the column less useful for things like sorting.

GNOME Nautilus actually offers two separate type columns, "Type" and "Detailed Type":
  • The "Detailed Type" is the MIME type description, similar to Windows' filetyping.
  • The "Type" column is just a very coarse categorization -- Video, Document, Image, etc.
The second one (the coarse type) is the one that often comes in really handy for sorting.

By sorting by coarse "Type", you can (for example) quickly group all of a directory's video files together, separating them out from any surrounding files in non-video formats. Because they're all listed as "Video" in the "Type" column, it totally doesn't matter whether every file is the same format with the same extension, or they're a complete jumble of different containers/extensions.

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martin
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@FeRDNYC: Sorry, I've misread your previous post.

So would showing a Mime type registered in Windows for that specific file extension be helpful? The Mime type starts with the "coarse categorization" (like image/). So sorting by that, you will get all documents of the "coarse category" grouped together.

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