UI Suggestion: Load Game interface filter/search and other enhancement opportunities

[birdybro]

Current Design: The current flow for the UI is for the user to click System and and then click Load Game, then to either scroll through their list of games, or to click the search/filter field and type in text at the bottom, and press enter. Also, the user cannot sort the file listing, like most other file explorers. They cannot sort by date modified, or change the order of descending/ascending for the current sort by name default. Finally, the use of this field is unintuitive because pressing enter if the field is blank doesn't clear the search results, it actually presses the "Cancel" but AFAICT, which is confusing. To clear the filter, you have to press the search button that is to the left, when enter would have ran the query.

Proposed Change: Make it so the default state of the load game screen begins with the search/filter field having the text cursor, and make it so the user doesn't have to press enter (make it adaptive) to filter the results. In summary, each of the changes that would help. Then, because the search button is not needed, and because this is more of a filter results than a search (semantics I guess), change the search button to simple text that says "Filter:" or "Search:" instead. Add ascending/descending by name and by date modified to the load game ui component. Finally, make it so pressing Enter when the load game screen is in focus always does "Open", and pressing Esc always does "Cancel" to avoid confusion. Here's the individual items that would need to be addressed if this were used.

• Change start condition of load game screen to have the text cursor be active in the search/filter field.
• Change the search/filter field so that it is adaptive (filters in real-time as you type with some kind of update delay interval, as opposed to requiring a press of the Enter key/Search button)
• Change the search icon+button to merely plain text that says "Filter:" or "Search:" or leave it the same but with an indicator that the search is to the right of it. Or have text when the field is blank behind the field itself which says "Filter by name here" or something like that.
• Add ascending/descending by name and by date modified capabilities.
• Change key press functionality to "Enter" always pressing "Open" and "Esc" always pressing "Cancel"

Thanks.

[Screwtapello]

Under Settings → Emulator, there's an option "Use native file dialogs", which will make "Load Game" bring up the same file-picker dialog that every other application uses. I'm pretty sure the only reason not to use native file dialogs is because the custom ones let you override whether to emulate a PAL or NTSC SNES instead of auto-detecting. That's a pretty niche feature, and I wonder if it would be better to put that option somewhere else, and always use native file dialogs.

[Alcaro]

I think the motivation is mostly being able to pick a .sfc/ folder, not just a .sfc file.

Still pretty niche, though. Does anyone except byuu use that? Does bsnes even still support it?

(I believe adding PAL/NTSC override is possible in the native file pickers on most OSes, though I suspect cramming that into hiro would be a mess.)

[Screwtapello]

That's the motivation for higan, but I recall being frustrated that bsnes couldn't pick a .sfc/ folder, so I don't think that's the case here.

I have no idea how complex it would be to add a custom Auto/NTSC/PAL control to native file-pickers, but if it's not too complex I'd take a PR for that.

[Screwtapello]

According to #44, native file-picker dialogs always use NTSC instead of Auto, limiting their usefulness somewhat. We'd need to fix that before considering dropping custom file-picker support.