Copy Dialog enhancement: One click action for existing files

[yulian5]

Description of the new feature or improvement

I'd like to offer for your judgment a few Copy Dialog enhancements. This is the third one.

One of the main reason I use Far - faster file manipulations than most of the other file managers. But there are a lot of areas in Far where improvements are still possible. Here is one example:

Option "Already existing files:" in "Copy" Dialog is implemented as drop-down list. That is required two keyboard or mouse clicks to change the choice.

Replacing drop-down list with radio buttons will help to make a change with one click only!

Sorry for terrible mockup (and I didn't show all the choices), it's just for illustration.

Of course, radio group looks ugly compare to slick drop-down. But we are for efficiency, not for the useless beauty, correct?
And anyway, look, we already have another radio button group in this dialog.

And I think it's better to save the user choice, and in case of radio buttons there is no need to highlight a different choice than default as it's clearly displayed anyway (but the highlighting doesn't hurt).

Proposed technical implementation details (optional)

No response

[MKadaner]

The one implementation difficulty I immediately see is the assignment of hot keys to all these new controls. And we have to support all languages. Believe me, it's a very tedious task.

Personally, I do not feel that combo boxes on dialogs slow me down. It all boils down to muscle memory, like Alt+X, three down, Enter. Technically, a single hot key takes less time; practically, no. Especially if both "Repeat delay" and "Repeat rate" in Control Panel are set to the fastest. With the mouse, it's of course a completely different story, but I do not use mouse. 🙂

[yegor-mialyk]

If your workflow requires copying files in "non-default" (Ask) mode dozens of times a day, it will be more productive for you to create a set of macro commands, or one with a menu, instead of making an extra single click (with radio button) or two (with dropdown)

[alabuzhev]

I didn't show all the choices

Indeed, it looks ok with 3 choices in English.
But we don't have 3 choices, we have 6.
And we have other languages, some of which have way longer words (e.g. German).

And this is why we have a drop down in the first place: radios don't scale.

[yulian5]

They actually quite fit on the next Warning dialog with the Ask option.

"Only newer files" doesn't belong to this drop-down anyway and should be a separate option to use it with other options.

The same with "Also ask on R/O files" - wrong place.

[yulian5]

Another note: Radio buttons may be located vertically, scaling the same way as drop-down. There is enough space for many additional options.

[yulian5]

@yegor-mialyk

it will be more productive for you to create a set of macro commands, or one with a menu, instead of making an extra single click (with radio button) or two (with dropdown)

As I proposed in other post saving the user choice will make it less than one click in average.

I'm personally using a lot of macros usually for more complicated tasks.

Using macros doesn't give you visual representation of the performing task and error prone. I mean you do not see what you going to do and what you're doing (usually).

Using API directly with macros doesn't require any dialogs and will perform faster. What's about to make Advanced Far Manager without dialogs?

[yulian5]

@yegor-mialyk

it will be more productive for you to create a set of macro commands

Anyway, thanks for suggestion, @yegor-mialyk. I'll create macros for now.

[yulian5]

This suggested improvement doesn't have enough community support.