otsaloma
Alternative actions
Hi,
there's a space for an improvement that I call 'nested lists'.
Let's imagine following scenario: we have Catapult with enabled applications plugin and Firefox desktop file. It has defined default program to run when executed, as well as 2 actions, as defined here - 'Open in new window' and 'Open in private window'. When using Catapult, one can only execute default script, it is not possible to get additional actions to be executed. Here comes nested list
catapult.Plugin could be extend to return list of choices to display in Catapult (exclusively - other choices are cleared). Current behaviour needs to be preserved so different key binding (i.e. Enter+Shift or anything, basically) could invoke proper method and get this nested list from plugin.
The use case I described with desktop files is only one but I came up with few ideas for this feature in my own plugins.
This has occured to me. For the files plugin, interesting actions could be "open containing folder" or, for directories, "open terminal".
But there's a difficult tradeoff here: If you have Shift+Enter or Ctrl+Enter directly execute alternative actions, then it's very undiscoverable and unclear. If you open some kind of a nested menu, as you seem to suggest, then the user interaction gets a bit too lengthy for a launcher: something like Arrow keys + Tab + Arrow keys + Enter instead of the default action which is Arrow keys + Enter.
Tab or Right Arrow would be definitely better that Shift + Enter. But that's a implementation detail, it can even be configurable.
While I agree that user experience will be not great, I do believe that benefit outweighs the costs in this specific case.
Also I wanted to emphasize that this mechanism can be utilized not only by applications plugin but by other ones as well.