What the hell is "Select all Shiny" ?

[slimjet4u]

I was trying out the Customization sync, and say this phrase "Select all Shiny" what does this mean. What is the use case when the files are same. It hinders the way for "Apply all selected" as those also get applied which are all the same. This gets weirder when it is done for all the plugins. Why select it when all are the same ??

Isn't this inefficient sync ??

[vrtmrz]

Thank you for opening the issue!

"Select all Shiny"

This button allows us to choose all files which have the newest modified time in each group. The use case is straightforward when we want to apply the newest changes to the current device.

Simply Newer things are chosen. And, why we do not filter Newer but the Same out is for the plug-in which cares about the modified time.

However, I am not sure about the behaviour which you pointed out -- everything the same is selected. It should not be selected.

Would you mind if I ask you to check the following things?

• Are these things still selected If you tap Deselect all once and tap Select all shiny? Are all of your things selected? Or, some specifics are always selected?
• Would you mind sharing the report? (We can make it in the Hatch pane).

[kylek29]

I came here looking for that explanation. This dialog might benefit from some QoL clean-up. "Shiny" seems like it maybe a technical jargon that many do not know (I assume the term shiny means "newer")?

Some possible UI suggestions:

• Button/Checkbox Filter (to hide/show) All w/ Time Difference
• Button/Checkbox Filter (to hide/show) All w/ Content Difference
• Add a tooltip or descriptive box to dialog that explains the different selector buttons (e.g. Select All Shiny), Maintenance Mode, and the other user-selecting options (such as the 4-options for the individual files like Automatic, Selective, Flagged-Selective, etc.).

There's a "Hide Not-Applicable Items" checkbox, but that seems to be very selective, and only hides the elements that are both equal in timestamp and content (?), which is very little with so many plugins since many seem to alter a file timestamp on Obsidian launch.

[Merlin04]

I also came here wondering what "select all shiny" does - after reading this, I think it's for choosing the last-modified version of the configuration files (so if I modified them on another device, it would sync those changes over)? And presumably "select flagged shiny" lets you mark some plugins as "flagged selective" so you can just sync those changes?

My ideas for what to change the buttons to, to make their meaning more clear:

• "Select all shiny" -> "Choose newest version for all items"
• "Select flagged shiny" -> "Choose newest version for flagged items"
• "Deselect all" -> "Clear all selections"
• "Apply all selected" -> "Apply changes"

I think it would also help make the interface more easily understood by adding a header to the table of items describing what the button and dropdown do, something like "Sync mode", "Name", "Choose version from"? When I first encountered the customization sync dialog it wasn't clear to me how to use it or what it does, and labeling currently-unlabeled UI elements might help with that.

Other questions:

• what do the "Automatic" and "Ignore" options for a plugin do? When should I use these instead of keeping the default "Selective"? I also think adding a bit of text in the dialog explaining this could be helpful.
• what's the difference between "MAIN" and "DATA" under each plugin? Maybe this is some obsidian internal detail that I don't know?
• what does "Scan changes" do? Is this different from "Refresh"? What about "Sync once"?

Also, this is a great feature (and a really great plugin) and I really appreciate the work you've put into making it! I hope this is helpful :)