File Explorer - Expanded Functionality

[nickmilo]

Here are a few basic “Finder-like” functionalities—nothing fancy—I’d like to see in future iterations.

• being able to arrow up and down through notes
• hitting enter on selected note to start renaming it
• while renaming clicking in the filename will put your cursor there
• cmd+delete to delete selected note

I know I’m missing others, please feel free to add other basic functionalities below…

[curtismchale]

Current enter selects the note or if it doesn’t exist, creates it. How about CMD/CTRL enter instead?

[nickmilo]

Can you clarify? You’re talking about the sidebar File Explorer right?

[curtismchale]

Opps sorry now I was confused and talking about the quick switcher

[nickmilo]

Ah I see, there might be room to iterate the quick switcher as well, but I’ll leave that alone for now

[goodsignal]

I like this! But pressing Enter on a note should open the note for editing. That’s a convention I’d like to keep. Stick with F2 for renaming or something else like Shift-Enter. I could see Alt-Enter opening an options menu for the selection, and being able to arrow-up/down to navigate that.

Furthermore, pressing something like Ctrl-Shift-Arrows could move a note around the directory tree. I imagine Obsidian would want to wait until the note was committed to its final spot before fussing with link reassignments though.

[curtismchale]

But on macOS enter does rename a file, which is maybe why @nickmilo suggested enter.

[goodsignal]

wow! really? What an odd UX choice that is. I like the philosophy that the easiest actions are matched to the most frequently needed tasks.

Now I have this vision that macOS users are merely going around renaming hundreds of files all day instead of going in and doing work. Many poor decisions were made on windows also but this seems like an unfortunate one for Mac.

[lizardmenfromspace]

Double Heart for the hotkey that allows you to easily move up and down notes in the file explorer.

My use case is that I have one note locked, then basically scroll through notes in a second pane looking for any connections between the notes.

[dlin]

Would love to see this hotkey as well!

[Klaas]

@curtismchale No, enter does NOT rename a file on macOS.

[nickmilo]

@Klaas Yes it does. Here’s a video to make sure we’re talking about the same thing:

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[cognociente]

@nickmilo I agree that the Obsidian File Explorer plugin needs to behave more like a Windows File Explorer or Finder. I don’t neccesarily agree on your choice of default shortcuts which seem mac specifc

[nixsee]

This is a crucial topic - when you have a large amount of notes, it is hard to use Obsidian without a more fully functioning File Explorer. I find myself moving away to VS Code Foam, which is a shame because I love a lot about Obsidian.

Here are related posts for file explorer bugs/feature requests:

• Natural Order Sorting
• Select Multiple Notes for drag & drop/delete
• Remember File Explorer State
• Separate panes for folders and files
• Expanded Sorting Functionality
• Show non-markdown files in Explorer
• Keyboard Navigation
• Drag and drop broken in long lists

[divyanshu]

Yes it does. That’s always been the default behaviour for Mac. Have you changed it by any chance?

[Klaas]

You are right. My apologies for the misunderstanding, which is from my side entirely.

[Jaeiya]

I just wanted to add my vocal support for this feature; having predictable delete/rename facilities within the file explorer would be an amazing QoL feature to have.

[JDLee]

Would also be useful to have the search return matching filenames.

[JDLee]

Ideally the file explorer would outline functions for navigating branching note sequences ( Folgezettel.

The value of this structure is controversial, but I’m convinced it provides a powerful complement to a purely heterarchical structure. The maps of concepts and structure notes address this issue to some degree but still seem lacking to me.

[maartin]

It would be great to have a hot key for navigating files in a folder.

I often go through files in a folder, for example they are all notes for an article I’m writing or because I want to check and add tags to improve my notes.

The hot key for navigating the last notes does not help me here.

It would be similar to this feature, but for all files in a folder:

Hotkeys to go forward or back a day in the daily notes folder

Idea: hotkeys to go forward/back a day in your daily notes. e.g. if i’m on 2020-05-14, hotkey to go back takes me to 2020-05-13 (for easy navigation across days). Hotkey to go forwards takes me to 2020-05-15.