What software do you wish that existed? (lemmy.world)

submitted 10 months ago by ChasingEnigma@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

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[-] mke@lemmy.world 12 points 10 months ago

Just curious, what are your issues with the current available options?

[-] Evkob@lemmy.ca 17 points 10 months ago

I'm not the person you replied to, but the one and only thing I miss about Windows is being able to paste a web address directly into the file picker.

Say I find an image here on Lemmy that I want to share with a friend on FB Messenger. On Windows, I could just copy the URL of the image, go to FB, "upload image" and paste the URL into the file picker dialog.

On Linux, I have to save it to my disk first.

[-] amio@kbin.social 17 points 10 months ago

Holy shit what?? I've been using Windows since 95 and didn't have the slightest idea you could do that.

[-] Evkob@lemmy.ca 12 points 10 months ago

It's not really advertised or intuitive in any way, so that doesn't surprise me. In fact, I have no recollection of how I came upon this feature. Maybe I discovered it in a fever dream, maybe it was on a lifehacker.com listicle. I'm not even sure it's supposed to be a feature, for all we know it could be an odd quirk, some legacy code in explorer.exe. The inner machinations of Windows are an enigma.

[-] baduhai@sopuli.xyz 9 points 10 months ago

I never knew you could do that. Maybe I'll try my hands at implementing that on the kde file picker.

[-] Evkob@lemmy.ca 5 points 10 months ago

If you ever get around to it, let me know. I'd buy you a drink!

[-] RoseRose56@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago

Say I find an image here on Lemmy that I want to share with a friend on FB Messenger. On Windows, I could just copy the URL of the image, go to FB, “upload image” and paste the URL into the file picker dialog.

so do the same and paste the link on facebook. I thought facebook shows image links on chats.

[-] Evkob@lemmy.ca 3 points 10 months ago

I could just send the link, but I'd rather it be displayed directly in the chat. In any case, this was just an example. When I wanted to upload my avatar to lemmy, I had to download the image I found online and then upload it via the file picker. It'd be more convenient to just point the file picker directly to the URL of where the image is hosted in the first place, which Windows' file picker dialog allows (or at least it did on Windows 7).

[-] mke@lemmy.world 1 points 9 months ago

Coincidentally, I was struggling and wishing I could do something similar a few days ago. Didn't know Windows could do it, that's awesome. I think, ideally, more software should accept pasting an image in input fields, without even the need to open a file picker. But the file picker handling URLs sounds cool as well.

You're not the person I replied to, but thanks for sharing :^)

[-] mihnt@lemmy.world 4 points 10 months ago

Can't preview files before choosing them. Only thing is that tiny little "preview" thing for pictures and videos. Have to squint to even see the little tiny preview. No right click to open in file picker. I could go on.

[-] mke@lemmy.world 1 points 9 months ago

Sorry, meant to reply sooner.

I don't know what your environment looks like, and I wouldn't try to fix it anyway—that's out of scope for a lemmy comment. I do want to mention some info that might be interesting/relevant for people reading this thread:

The GTK file chooser, if that's what you're using, already has better file previews.
Sadly, programs won't always use the best method available to do things. While Upscaler gives me nice image previews in the file picker, my installation of Firefox hasn't even updated it to GTK 4.
Portals seem to be a good step towards more uniform and predictable user experiences.
- "[...] any application can use portals to provide uniform access to features independent of desktops and toolkits."
Point being, better things exist and are on their way. Adoption is slow, but we're getting there.
...And on a semi-related note, if you have previews for certain file types, but not for others, check if you're missing a package. That took one search and one command to fix something that'd been bothering me for weeks.

Exact issues and how bad they are depend heavily on your setup, such as which desktop environment you use and which software (& versions) you have installed. That seems to be a common description of ~~UX~~ problems in the Linux ecosystem, I wonder why :^)))

But hopefully I managed to spread some positivity(?) about the state of things and where we're going.

this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2024

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