Spent some more time on dynamo-browse this morning, just a little bit.

Got one new feature built and merged to main, which is the ability to copy the displayed item to the pasteboard by pressing c. This is directly inspired by a feature in K9S, which allows you to copy the logs of a running pod to the pasteboard (I use this feature all the time). The package I’m using to access the pasteboard is github.com/golang-design/clipboard, which seems to offer a nice cross-platform approach to doing this.

The copied item is not meant for machine use. It’s exactly what’s displayed in the item viewport and is intended for tracking items that change over time. What I’ve found myself doing, when I need to track such an item, is to manually select it with Terminal and pasting it to an untitled textedit window. I do this again when the item changes until I’m ready to eye the changes manually. It’s not sophisticated, but it tends to work. And although this feature is not a full-blown item comparer, it will make this use case a little easier. Plus, it will copy the entire image, not just the lines displayed when a viewed item is too large for the viewport.

Speaking of which, the other thing I started working on today was on allowing the user to resize the item viewport to take up more of the screen. At the moment, the displayed item viewport takes up the bottom 14 lines of the screen, and is not resizable. Naturally, for large items, this is not large enough, and having the ability to resize this viewport would be a good thing to have.

I’ve been thinking about the best way to handle this, and I’ve decided that an approach similar to how Vim does this — where you need to press a key-chord followed by a number to move the vertical split between two views — would be a little to annoying here. Too much fine grain control for when you just need the viewport bigger. So, I’m opting for a more course-grain approach, where you simply press w and the viewport size will cycle amongst 5 different sizes:

  • 14 rows at the bottom of the screen (the default)
  • Half the screen
  • All but the top 6 rows of the screen, so you can still see a bit of the table view
  • The entire screen (i.e. hiding the table view)
  • Completely hidden (i.e. the table view takes up the entire screen).

Doing this will not necessarily steal focus from the table view: even if shown the entire screen, you can still go through each item by pressing Up or Down. But you’ll be able to see more of the selected item.

Anyway, that’s the theory. We’ll see how well this works in practice.