pepak wrote: ↑Sun 25 Oct, 2020 11:44
1. Is it possible to create multiline descriptions?
Technically, yes, you can create a multiline description even in FAR itself (
CtrlZ l i n e 1 CtrlQ CtrlM Space l i n e 2 Enter
) but FAR will use only the first line for whatever operations. Some good old plug-ins (like
DescEdit or
AltDescr) and tools (like
PDE) used to support multiline descriptions but the plug-ins were not ported to FAR 3, and I doubt PDE supports Unicode file names.
pepak wrote: ↑Sun 25 Oct, 2020 11:44
2. Is it possible to create descriptions for files in subdirectories (e.g. using backslash for separator)?
I never heard of such scenario, and the standard
TmpPanel plugin doesn't seem to support descriptions at all.
pepak wrote: ↑Sun 25 Oct, 2020 11:44
3. How does it work if Descriptions.ListNames contain multiple files and the same filename appears in two description files but with a different description in each?
My experiments show that FAR finds the first existing descriptions file from the list in the current directory and ignores others, so e.g. if you specify description of file 1 in, say,
Descript.ion
and description of file 2 in, say,
Files.bbs
, you'll see only one of these descriptions at a time depending on which descriptions file is listed first in preferences.
pepak wrote: ↑Sun 25 Oct, 2020 11:44
4. Does the item order make any difference? For example, should I keep the filenames sorted?
No, the order does not make any difference for FAR, but it may make some difference for some people — e.g. when I download a bunch of related files and assign descriptions right away, I'll be more comfortable seeing them grouped when viewing or editing the descriptions file manually. So, ideally, when your plug-in renames files and updates their names in the descriptions file, I'd prefer it to avoid reordering lines.
pepak wrote: ↑Sun 25 Oct, 2020 11:44
5. Which encoding and line ending should I use? It seems to me FAR uses ANSI+CRLF, but is that a fixed thing or can it vary
As for EOLs, FAR overwrites with CRLF upon each update but reads LF and CR just fine. Encoding is determined by the settings:
[ ] Use ANSI code page by default
and
[ ] Save in UTF-8
. Unless UTF-8 is chosen, either ANSI or OEM is used. So you plug-in should either mirror this logic or use UTF-8 because Unicode file names will lose their descriptions otherwise.