I often find myself moving the mouse and hitting a file to view its content
in the viewer pane. And then i mousemove again and hit another file to
compare the content. And then, back to the first file and so on..
Sometimes you just want to check two jpgs or txt-files and I would find
it very handy if you could just hit a key to switch the selection to the lastly
selected and the current select file.. the viewer pane should automatically
update of course.
I usually open another lister/viewer and look at both files at once.
Or open the same directory in the dual display (i.e. turn on the dual display as it happens by default with my settings) so I can select one file in one side and the other file in the other side and then, since they're highlighted, it's easy to click them to change which is displayed in the viewer.
Or, perhaps the best option if you do this a lot, select both files and then click a button which hides all other files, so it's then easy to switch between the two with the cursor keys or mouse.
I think the most logical solution would be to have a "history of selected files", supplementing the history of directories we have now. Or, the history function might have a toggle between the two types.
Then to get back and forth you would just use the "Go back" and "Go forward" functions (or whatever they are called in the English version).
When would you update this history? Every time the selection changed at all? So if you select one file, then Ctrl-Select another, would you have three items in your selection history? (i.e. Nothing, File1, File1+File2) Or would it only add an item when you deselected everything? Or?
Unless it does something really clever I can't see a selection history being very useful, except in one or two situations, since it would get very cluttered up by normal activity.
Maybe a way to save the current selection and later recall it would work? So you select one or more files, click a button and that selection is added to a list somewhere. (Photoshop lets you do this, although it's such a different application to Opus that it may not be a good example.) Or would you want it to be automatic?
I do not think that cluttering would matter much, as the function would be used for quick jumping around selections, not for going back far in the past (therefore it scope would be much more narrow than the directories history). That is, recalling just a few of operations back would be enough.
The idea with file history where the items are selected is not too much different than adding files to a collection, so it would be redundant in a way. However, this shows that collections might have a useful option, namely limited size. In that way one collection might work as a "most recently used" file list without getting cluttered too much.
I am not yet sure if collection's items might be recalled from instructions one by one, without opening of the collection. If not, this would also be needed for that functionality.
[quote="Jabberwock"]I think the most logical solution would be to have a "history of selected files", supplementing the history of directories we have now. Or, the history function might have a toggle between the two types.
Then to get back and forth you would just use the "Go back" and "Go forward" functions (or whatever they are called in the English version).[/quote]
If you can stand to have it in an external window you can use the Show command for this. Select (or shift-select) the files you want, and click the Show button on the toolbar. The standalone viewer will open with only those files in its next/previous list.