[Unison-hackers] Usability suggestion: elide parts of long path names

[Pat McGee]

Guys,
    I'm using Unison 2.9.1 with the text ui. I often sync disks with 
hundreds or thousands of changes. That takes me a while, and I'm 
looking for ways to speed up vetting the proposed changes.

    (Why do I vet each and every change first? Well, I may not be 
paranoid, but I don't think I miss it by much. And, I sometimes do 
things that Unison gets confused by. So, I do need the line-by-line 
decision making.)

    When I look at marked changes, I look for patterns. I want to look 
at three things, most of the time. I want to look at the first few 
columns, which tell me what kind of change is being made and in which 
direction. I look at the first part of the path name to see if it's in 
the same area as the previous change. I look at the file name to see if 
it is similar to or different than what I expect.

    When I use Unison on deeply nested directories with long path names, 
I have trouble doing that. Often the lines are very long, and I can't 
make the window wide enough to keep the text from wrapping to the next 
line. When the text wraps, the patterns are harder to see. Instead of 
the type of change being on the left and the file name on the right, 
the type is one line up and the file name below it, both on the left.

    To avoid this problem, I'd like Unison to take a width parameter, 
and to chop up path names to make them fit in this size. To chop 
things, I'd elide things from the middle of the name of a path 
component, starting in the middle of the path, and going outward to 
each end. The width parameter could either be a number, or a keyword 
that says to take the width from the window.

    For example, I'd elide
Changed --->         Music-iTumes/iTunes/iTunes Music/Hildebrand, David 
& Hildebrand, Ginger/Over The Hills and Far Away/27 Planxty Fanny Power 
_ Oyle of Barley.mp3
To
Changed --->         Music-iTunes/iTunes/iTu…sic/Hild…ger/Over…way/27 
Planxty Fanny Power _ Oyle of Barley.mp3

    I'd leave the first and last components untouched as much as 
possible. I'd elide from the middle of a name, leaving the first few 
and last few characters. I'd elide from the middle of a path, going 
toward both ends, but going first in the direction of longest path 
component names.

    If this catches anyone's interest, I'd like to see this feature show 
up someday.

Pat

---
Pat McGee
Ph.D. Student, Computer Sciences Department, Florida Institute of 
Technology
Treasurer, Association for Software Testing, Inc. 
(http://AssociationForSoftwareTesting.org)
Editor, CS Department Tech Report Library (http://cs.fit.edu/~tr)

jpmcgee at cs.fit.edu
http://cs.fit.edu/~jpmcgee
http://blackbox.cs.fit.edu/blog/pat
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