Appropriate menu placement

[basti1302]

The Eclipse menus are very heavy, there is a lot of items. That is why menus group items into submenus. And, there is a special "Open With" or "Show In" group for opening extensions like this. I think it had to be reused. "Copy resource path into clipboard" does not fit this category indeed. But, it is not that necessary since Eclipse is the Number One IDE in providing user access to resource path info. Just click Properties item, right next to your StartExplorer.

Originally submitted by valentin tihhomirov ( valtih1978 ) on 2012-01-23 01:53:41 PST via project's former sourceforge tracker.

[basti1302]

Originally posted by me on 2012-02-09 13:13:17 PST on project's former sourceforge tracker
.
I think I can agree with what you say about the menu placement. With one
exception: I really like to have the Copy resource path to clipboard
option. Clicking Properties and then fumbling with the Properties dialog to
manually selecting and copying the resource path is just a bit to
inconvenient for my taste. Of course, that's really a matter of taste.

I'll think about that, but to be honest, it's quite low on my priority
list.

If you are interested, you are of course welcome to provide a patch :-))

Regards

Bastian

[genodeftest]

My Opinion:

Current menu Layout of Eclipse with startExplorer is now:

[startExplorer context menu on any file or folder]
    StartExplorer >
        Show in File Manager
        Start Shell Here
        Open Files with default Application
        Copy Resource Path to Clipboard
        Custom Commands >
            Edit with notepad
            echo to temp file

[context menu on single file selection]
    New >
    --------------------
    Open
    Open With >
        [Editors registered in Eclipse]
        -------------------------------------
        System Editor
        Default Editor
        -------------------------------------
        Other
    Open Type Hierarchy
    Show In >
        [Views registered in Eclipse]
    […]

[context menu on folder selection]
    New >
    ---------------------
    Open in new Window
    Open Type Hierarchy
    Show In >
        [Views registered in Eclipse]
    […]


[context menu on multiple file selection]
    New >
    ---------------------
    Open
    Show In >
        [Views registered in Eclipse]
    […]

Ideally I think it would be:

[context menu on single file selection] (is Ok as it is without StartExplorer)

[better context menu on folder selection]
    New >
    ---------------------
    Open With >
        System File Explorer
        System Terminal
    Open in new Window
    Open Type Hierarchy
    Show In >
        [Views registered in Eclipse]
    […]

[better context menu on multiple file selection] (is Ok as it is without StartExplorer)

Some details:

1. I think StartExplorer duplicates too much functionality from the currently available menus and 'Preferences:General:Editors:File Associations'
2. "Show in File manager" and "Start Shell Here" are only applicable to folders, replacing Eclipse's "Open" which is not available on folders. They would ideally be handled by a "Folder" file type and should only be visible if one (or more) folders are selected.
3. "Open Files with default Application" is a unnecessary duplicate of "Open With > System Editor" and can fully be configured with the user's desktop environment.
4. Copy Resource Path to Clipboard is helpful if multiple files are selected. I don't use these since in favor of the terminal command 'ls'.
5. Custom Commands > Edit with notepad / echo to temp file : I don't use these. With these defaults they should not be visible on *nix systems by default.

[studgeek]

That does sound like a nice solution. And it would possibly allow associating file types with different types of external actions.

[basti1302]

I really like the idea to distribute the StartExplorer commands in the context menu and put each in the appropriate section, instead of having one StartExplorer menu entry as the root (as it is now).

In detail:

3. Dropping "Open Files with default Application" completely. I think that would be okay for me. It's probably really redundant.
4. I would really like to keep this. I use it often.
5. As said elsewhere, these are just examples and we can drop them completely and provide StartExplorer without any pre-defined custom commands. Right now, a user already can easily delete this examples. They also will not show up again when updating the StartExplorer plug-in and using the same workspace.

Regarding 2) Actually, StartExplorer does some pretty sensible things (IMO) for "Show in File Manager" and "Start Shell Here" for files as well as for folders and even when multiple files/folders are selected. I think it's quite a bit smarter than the standard Eclipse menu options in some of the cases. Thus, I really would like to keep both of them around for files as well as for folders and also for multi-selections. These actions can also be executed from the editor, in which case they either act on the currently opened file or - when some text is selected - they interpret the selected text as a file system path and act on that path then. We need to keep this in mind when changing menu placement/behaviour for the two.

I'll write more on this topic later today.

[genodeftest]

2), 4): You are right on that. I don't use them at all so I didn't think about this use case.