Yet, there's room for improvement. Particularly wrt to "Leave at least 1 ... unselected".
I found a few threads re that but none of them seemed to express what I was thinking of lately.
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In advance: plz accept my apologies for this lengthy and possibly demanding post. I tried my best to make it as concise, yet complete and comprehensible as possible.
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Ok, this is about dupes and then the "Leave at least 1 ... unselected".
In that case we first of all have a set of groups, each of which contains a set of at least 2 files considered equal (by whatever criterion). Then, as my assumed use-case and plainly, THE use-case IMHO, the question is "which file to keep?", per group.
Now, I think it's all about sorting - namely within each group, independently.
The other two ways - for completeness - to understand "sorting" in this context would be:
- - "flat", ie simply ignoring "sameness" within groups, or, for short, groups altogether: that's already there: simply click on column headers, consequently loosing the "grouping" information
- sorting of groups (as such): not available but not interesting either, IMHO
Then a simple checkbox "Keep first" would suffice, avoiding the need for hard-coding the very limited
- - "Newest/Oldest/Largest/First in group/Last in group" in each of
- 3 (why not 2, or 4, or x?) fixed "levels"
- and also the IMHO rather strange limitation in the 3rd level to "First/Last" (I understand that it's needed as kind of a last resort in the current setting - this proposal's about a new setting)
This approach would open up the possibility of sorting each group
- - by any value from any content plugin (there IS a natural choice for the partial order relation for every type of return value AFAIK; talking of fns ContentGetSupportedField and ContentCompareFiles in wcx interface)
- in any nr of "levels" or "prioritized criteria" (GUI shouldn't be too hard, eg like one can add any # of custom attributes in Files | Change Attributes)
Also, I'm pretty confident that this could subsume all of the rather confusing/overwhelming "Select by name/extension", "Remove selection by [...]", "Select by date/time", "Select by file size" that currently are in that dialog, tab "Files".
Hence it would greatly simplify the task of describing this UI - which, from my exp - is quite good an indication that the UI itself would be greatly simplified.
But as said, I haven't thought through *this* enough yet.
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ps: There exists a real use-case which could be solved with the above proposal but not currently: Doppelte Dateien - wie handhabe ich das. Upon request I'll happily explain/exemplify the problem in English here.