File and project manager features

[lammas]

First, my questions:

• Are there any plans for a file manager style thing for the current directory or current project?
• Are there any plans for a project switcher kind of thing (e.g. jetbrains ides)
• And slightly related to this: are there any plans for a project state system where I could launch flow and be back with the same files I had open before, ideally scrolled to where I left them?

I dig everything about this editor and I'm trying to daily drive it, but I've run into a few things I'm struggling with on very large** projects. Maybe I'm using it wrong and there's a "correct" approach with combining flow with yazi and such tools - feel free to educate me on this.

**Very large: imagine a system with hundreds of python modules that are all self-contained, but can also have dependencies on each other and require me to do a lot find-in-files across the project.

[neurocyte]

• Are there any plans for a file manager style thing for the current directory or current project?

Yes and no. Flow already has a fuzzy finder for the current project. But I assume you mean something more like perhaps a tree view or breadcrumb navigation.

Breadcrumb navigation to other files in the project is planned, fairly short term. A tree view is not planned as of yet as I don't really use them, but it's a fairly popular request so you are welcome to open a feature request, if there isn't one already. If there is one already, upvote it.

[neurocyte]

• Are there any plans for a project switcher kind of thing (e.g. jetbrains ides)

This already exists. It is bound to ctrl+r in Flow input mode. You can also find it in the command palette under Open project.

[neurocyte]

• And slightly related to this: are there any plans for a project state system where I could launch flow and be back with the same files I had open before, ideally scrolled to where I left them?

There is a project state system, yes. At the moment it stores the access times of files in the project to restore the order of files in the fuzzy file finder and the current location in each file to restore the cursor position. It could be extended to restore the previously open files. Please open a feature request if you want that.

[neurocyte]

I'm struggling with on very large** projects.

What struggles exactly?

I use flow daily with several projects with around a hundred thousand files and 3+ million lines of code. Any issue you have with projects smaller than that should probably be considered a bug and you're welcome to report it.

[lammas]

The main struggle is keeping the file hierarchy in my brain, this is especially true for repos where I'm not familiar with the existing hierarchy yet and a tree-view does help with that a lot.

I'm getting used to the ctrl+r project switcher, but:

• currently it only seems show 12 most recent dirs as projects (this may be a bug since it shows a scrollbar but no scroll happens when i reach the end of the list; using flow built from master 2 days ago) edit: my bad, misunderstood how things work ^ _ ^
• the projects are automatically added, so when I open flow in some subdir of a project it becomes a project too and that produces useless noise in my case

[neurocyte]

• the projects are automatically added, so when I open flow in some subdir of a project it becomes a project too and that produces useless noise in my case

You can start flow with --no-persist if you don't want it to store the project. Or use --project to explicity set the project directory.

I think perhaps it would be good to automatically open the parent project if flow is started in a directory inside an existing project. I'm not sure though. Thoughts are welcome.

Btw, you can remove projects by just deleting the project file in ~/.local/state/flow/projects.

[lammas]

Found another project-management related thing I rely on that maybe I can get some direction with:
Is there a way to include multiple roots in one project?

Some background on why I desire this kind of thing:
I work on Odoo projects a lot and this involves a lot of checking the upstream for what data model to inherit or which view or template to extend. Currently we've solved it by having multiple content roots added to projects in various IDEs (vscode and pycharm mostly).
This way "find in files" and reference finding includes the corpus of the upstream and makes finding relevant things fast.

[neurocyte]

No, flow does not have any kind of multi-project support.

You could maybe just put all your sub-projects in one directory and just treat it as one large project in flow.

[lammas]

I figure I might as well describe my use-case for this multi-root setup, so you can weigh if this is a feature you might consider adding, or at least accepting a PR for it (sometime when I've understood this repo enough).

The directory structure I work with looks like this:

~/odoo/
	+-- odoo-master
	+-- odoo-19
	+-- odoo-18
	+-- odoo-17
	+-- odoo-16
	|
	+-- internal-product-referencing-master
	+-- lts-product-pinned-to-19
	+-- lts-product-pinned-to-16
	+-- another-product-pinned-to-16
	|   ...

The different odoo-* checkouts are referenced in multiple repos depending if it is a project built against the bleeding edge or some lts version.

Since having full git history in each of these distinct repos is required for looking things up and the repos are huge, it is more convenient to have a single copy of them cloned.

The reasons for why these are not submodules are long and I will not go into it here. I can of course work around this with symlinks, but it does not look nice and adds another step for setup.

[neurocyte]

Flow does technically allow you to open multiple projects at once and switching between them is instant because they remain open in memory (including any LSPs the project started). An open project is indicated by a green dash in the project list. The UI does not currently "attach" to more then one project at a time though.

Btw, there is work-in-progress to restore more of the UI when switching between projects. Especially open tabs and a few other things.

What specific cross project features would you use? I'm guessing "find in all open projects" might be useful? Maybe some way of grouping projects to open them at once might be useful too?

[lammas]

Your guess is absolutely correct: "find in all open projects" is the main thing and when I manage to get odoo-ls working, I would love to have some go to definition or reference functionality.

The most used find-in-files-across-projects thing I do is search by ^_name = .data\.model\.name.$ and ^_inherit = .data\.model\.name.$ which I'm hoping a good language server can perhaps automate (building inheritance trees for the pseudo-inheritance used in Odoo).