GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 652187
Filesystem references should not be links
Last modified: 2017-07-31 12:41:05 UTC
It's my contention that references to filesystem, folders, directories should not be highlighted and made into links. E.g. I use Tomboy on Windows at work and document stuff that happens on servers. I frequently refer to locations like "/usr/sap" in my documents. This is a remote inaccessible directory on a unix host, not something my local Windows box can access. Making it a link seems somewhat pointless in this instance. In addition it makes it harder to select text which is a folder. So for example if I have a reference to "/usr/sap/ERP/DVEBMGS60/work" and only want to select "DVEBMGS60" into my clipboard for pasting into a terminal I have to be really careful about how I do it, because when I go near the reference the cursor changes to a finger and I am unable to select it.
I do think we should make this configurable. I'm not sure I agree that we should change the default behavior, though.
I agree, that would be super. Ideally I'd like to switch off _all_ hyperlinking that isn't links to other notes.
I think that that's the right idea. Either have it globally either turned on or turned off.
FWIW, I think having a global option to enable/disable this makes sense. It also makes sense to me that you would check that the link actually points to something before highlighting it.
I can understand the inclination for checking for a file's existence before highlighting. However, the existence of a thing doesn't imply a semantic link. Also, we have to think about notes existing on multiple hosts. And Benjamin raised a good point in the thread about having to maintain the state of these links. If I create a note with /home/greg/foo in it, and the file exists, then a link to the file would be created. If I delete /home/greg/foo in the FS, what happens to the link? Is it broken? Do we have to check for the existence of all links when the note is opened? What about when the note window is closed and then re-opened -- this matters because we currently keep note objects around after you close them so they'll be re-opened quickly? This starts to get tricky. Honestly, what it seems like we need is highlight-and-create-link functionality and then not maintain state afterwards. I. e., HREF anchors in notes. That becomes a whole other issue, however.
Is it possible to have the file path linking be solely a display issue? That is, the note itself would not contain the markup, it would be just a path. But, whenever a note is opened/saved, then create links for text that looks like a file system path if the path points to soemthing that exists (assuming the global setting is "on" for that feature). > what it seems like we need is highlight-and-create-link functionality I think thats a good idea regardless and seems to be tied to: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=652222 So if I have arbitrary text, highlight it, and click the link button, up pops the "make link" dialog box. Dialog box has a few options (maybe tabs) A) enter external URL B) link to TB Note C) link to filesystem. C would be selected by default and pre-populated with the selected text if selected text matched a regex for file system URLs on that platform and the path exists.
(In reply to comment #5) I wonder if a compromise would be not to make these types of paths / links actionable unless a keyboard key is held when "mousing" over the link. Like hold down ctrl which would turn it into a link or make it actionable. Randy's idea is cool, but makes Tomboy more into an "editor". Sounds more like a add-in at this point.
The Tomboy team has moved from GNOME Bugzilla to GitHub for bug reports and feature requests: https://github.com/tomboy-notes/tomboy/issues/ Closing this report as NOTGNOME as part of Bugzilla Housekeeping (bug 781054) to keep tasks in one place. Please feel free to transfer this task to GitHub if this task is still valid in a recent Tomboy version. We are sorry for the inconvenience.