Collection list should be usable by keyboard

[Adam Olsen]

Currently there is no way (at least no one that I've found) to add music in the music collection list to the playlist without using a pointer device.

My suggestion is that the selected artist/album/track should be added by pressing enter. Expanding and collapsing of artists and albums is already possible with + and -.

(Possibly this approach could be considered even for the mouse events - a double click could add to playlist leaving the arrow on the left for expanding/collapsing.)

There are lots of other things (some quite obvious) that could be easily done to make Exaile usable without the need of a pointer device - I will think a little and come back later :P

This ticket was migrated from the old trac: re #506

[Ovidiu Gheorghioiu (ovy)]

I'm a new user of Exaile, and I too found this limiting. I do my collection selection through search, though, so I've approached the problem from that angle.

The patch below partially addresses your problem, I think. The remainder, loading the selected item when keyboard-navigating through the collection box, is trivial and I can work on a quick follow-on patch.

Developers: I'm new to bzr/launchpad too. I don't know if the patch file contains the description from my local commit, so I'm pasting it below as well. Also, let me know if I should submit a follow-on patch that binds treelist activate to append_to_playlist as a separate one (bzr send ?what?), or as a new bigger patch.

   Improve keyboard navigation in the search filter box:
    * After doing a search, select the lowest unique path; for example,
    the only album that matches, or the only song.
    * When pressing Enter in the filter box, Do-What-I-Mean:
      * if the search is still pending, do the search now (current behaviour).
      * if the search has been displayed, and there is an item selected,
        append that item (e.g. album, song) to the playlist

    In practice, this works very well: you search, look, hit Enter, things
    start playing. It's roughly what Amarok does, although I actually noticed
    this after coding the change. It simply bothered me that it didn't work
    like I expected.

    Small related changes:
    * Improved some comments that would've made this change much easier
    * Replaced start_count'ing with explicitly passing the keyword to
    the append_info thread. This eliminates a race condition (songs and self.keyword
    don't match).

[Ovidiu Gheorghioiu (ovy)]

An updated patch is below, that also loads items to the playlist when navigating through the tree and pressing Enter/Space/Shift-Space. I concur about double-clicking. I need to test with a
device, but it should work.

The commit msg is below:

  Key navigation in the collection tree: on space, shift-space, enter (the
  tree's default row activation keys), append selected items to the playlist.

  Right now, that behaviour is different from double-clicking (which only
  appends album, or tree leaves, and expands anything else), but I think
  that behaviour is a bit sketchy to begin with.

[Steve Dodier-Lazaro (sidi)]

I believe someone with pygtk knowledge will be able to write a patch for this during the bug day event.

The behaviour I propose is as follows :
 * bottom / top / page up / page down -> browse up / down
 * right -> expand selected trees (not recursively)
 * left -> collapse selected trees
 * space / enter -> append to current playlist
 * 'menu' key -> show the menu

There are built-in functions for all of this, already.