Suggestions for the new Quick Open dialogs

[MewPurPur]

godotengine/godot#56772 added a new Quick Open dialog. While I appreciate the work done and believe this is a better base to build on top of, I think some of the changes make the new Quick Open inferior for my personal workflows. I've also seen criticism I agree with that it doesn't fit well with Godot's UI and UX.

One click to open a file

Closely linked to godotengine/godot#98726

In the new dialog, files open with a single click, before you even release the mouse button. I've never seen this in file dialogs, it's really unexpected, and a few people in the comments of the PR agreed with it. This also makes multi-select unusable, which I've used many times to open similarly named files. For example, opening all my "Element" to implementing a new method in many of them or fix a common bug.

I would suggest to rework this so that:

• Double click is once again necessary to open a file
• Ctrl and Shift can be used similarly to ItemList.
• Open and Cancel buttons are reintroduced on the bottom, and the options are moved to the top, next to the search.
• Right-click shows a context popup with a single "Open" option. (?)

Reintroducing the "Open" and "Cancel" buttons doesn't seem like it should be an issue, even with RMB, as that would hurt the discoverability of multi-open.

I believe this needs to be done the usual way, by storing internally a list of selected items and the last selection as a pivot. Without ItemList being used anymore, it would need to be manual.

Everything uses the pointing hand cursor

This is uncommon in Godot's UI. The pointing hand cursor is never used when you're hovering a button.

In the new Quick Opne dialog, all the buttons have the Pointing Hand style.

I don't personally mind the pointing hand itself and use it in my own UIs, but it's distracting since it's not what I expect from Godot.

Hover theme is not in line with other UI elements

Typical for Godot's theming is a subtle translucent stylebox, like so.

Quick Open uses this hover stylebox:

Space between items

There is spacing between items in the new dialog:

This was recently addressed in other parts of Godot engine. Leaving little spaces like that makes it more likely to click on nothing instead of on the item you meant to, which is a small annoyance, and it also takes more space from the already sparser UI.

Other issues

• This is probably a bug, but the layout (Grid/List view) resets between usages
• The Grid view buttons also have a bad top margin

Uhhh uhhh mockup...

[Jowan-Spooner]

I agree with the points stated here. I will also copy my opinion-comment from discord:

I've also been a bit skeptic, but was afraid it was just me being so used to the older one. Still not sure. But I feel like especially for scripts and honestly most scenes, the thumbnails add little to nothing, while the path is pretty informative. Like I often identify scripts by what folder they are in, even if I wasn't sure on the exact spelling of the file name. Now with the file path being severly reduced in size and readability this is pretty much lost. Also it takes a much bigger window to display the same amount of results.

And it lost the last used list, which was previously the default state before you started searching and which was very useful to me.

And it doesn't remember the List vs Thumbnails state I think...

I think I see the intentions, but for me it's rough right now, especially as I had really gotten used to using all three shortcuts all the time...

So TL:DR, I'd appreciate a setting to display the full paths again and turn thumbnails off (especially for scripts). While not perfect for visual resources like textures, the previous Script Quick Open used it's space pretty well imo, and the path (beyond the file name) is very relevant/useful for identifying many types of resources, often more so then thumbnails, at least to me.

[MewPurPur]

I like the thumbnails and I think the paths were a bit of an eyesore, so I think what we have right now is a better default. That said, I think it would also be good to implement something like a Compact view that's closer to the old UI.

[MewPurPur]

Another thing that threw me off about it is the inconsistent sizing of list items, as shown here.

I'm doing a PR to address some of these things.