[Edbrowse-dev] a Common Go Command

[Edbrowse-dev] a Common Go Command

[Karl Dahlke]

This is a suggestion from one of our users.
Don't know if I would have thought of it myself.
It is a change in the user interface so we have to move carefully.

When you browse the internet and you click on a link,
the resulting web page is automatically rendered or played,
in whatever manner that may be.
It just does what it's suppose to do.
Plugins are used as needed, unless of course plugins are disabled.
If it's an audio file then play the music, if it's pdf then render it, etc.
That is convenient, and it's how other browsers work.
So far so good.

It has been suggested that the g command in directory mode work the same way.
Call up a file, and if it can be played then just play it,
if it can be rendered then just render it.

1. It is consistent with the internet experience.

2. This is how other file managers work in other operating systems.
Click on a pdf file in windows or mac and you are reading that file.

3. It allows for certain optimizations.
Imagine a 50 megabyte pdf file.
If you call up this file from directory mode,
as it works today, the 50mb file is loaded into memory,
and chopped up into lines and so on.
Then when you type b to browse it it is all put back together again
in a temp file so pdftohtml can operate on it.
But if you knew you were going to browse it anyways,
if that's what the g command meant,
then you wouldn't load the file into the buffer at all.
You would just call the plugin on it directly and then
browse the output of that.
Much faster response.

I think it's an intriguing idea.

Karl Dahlke