If columns that have categorical data, could be shaded based on their value, then that would greatly help identify rows with identical values.
MD5 / SHA, and day-granularity date or age based columns, or month, day of week, all would qualify
This presumably would not be challenging to do ?
Cheers,
Brian
I guess you are asking for a Heatmap style colouring?
This would be nice feature for some columns but I don't know if it work that well for a Hash column. A hash is very large number. So you could have two numbers that are different by 1, and two that are different by trillions.
What you would really needs is something like identicons. but I don't think that would work so well with just colours alone.
An alternate solution would be to group by that column.
For ages, you could add the relative age graphs, which give you a visual way to compare the age of two files. You can have them in separate columns, or behind the normal date/time columns.
Script columns can specify custom colors now, I think, but you'd need to define an algorithm to decide on what color something should be based on its hash or date, which I'm not sure is that straightforward (at least in a way that doesn't result in things that are hard to read, or that all look too similar).
Sorting and grouping seem like better solutions to being able to easily see when two things are the same in any given column.
I am reminded of a while back where I thought it would be good to try take a log of the a value to try highlight differences. It didn't work. When you have a value set with a large range of number. It will always be difficult to see small changes.
For grouping, can you sort by group count?
I'm not sure that's possible, but a script could probably do something using the FileGroup, e.g. filtering out items which are in groups of their own, so all the single-item groups are hidden.
Hi Leo,
sometimes it's easier to deliver a 70 to 90 % solution
than to sweat the details, even if they're technically correct.
I've done this in spreadsheets where I've split the checksum into 3 roughly equal parts,
converted them to integers, done a modulus against 255,
then used the 3 remainders as Red, Green & Blue indexes.
The BitCascade characteristic of checksum algorithms
in 95 + % of cases ensures that the background colours
are different enough to be distinguishable.
The key question is, is there a Grid.Cell.Background.Colour property
that can be set.
Even better, can a post-update routine be created for each field that
can have the required code inserted ?
Please advise,
cheers
Brian
I think I was wrong in the older post. I can't see a way for script columns to change their text/background colors for individual rows.
The colors of graphs can be specified, but only for the whole column, not individual rows. That's probably what I was thinking of.
You'd also still need to ensure the random colors left the text readable.
Using grouping seems a better way to visually check things.
Have you considered adding a special column to display the hash as an Identicon. I suspect it would be a lot of work for something that would a mostly cute feature.
Adding the sort by group count would be handy for a few use cases.
What does sort by group count mean?
When a Lister is grouped by a column, being able to have have the groups ordered by the number of items in them.
I.E. If we grouped by an MD5 hash, and two files had the same hash have that group be first (assuming no other groups had 2).
This is not what Brianm wanted I think it would satisfy the request (all be it with a few extra steps).