Feature request: Indicate date/tag items were first introduced and last seen in the repo

[eugenesan]

It would be extremely useful to be able to see the date/tag items were first introduced and last seen in the repo.

I can see a few UI options:

1. Press "enter" to open a dialog detailing item info
2. Display current item's info on the bottom status line
3. Display current item's info along side on the same line
4. Display all visible item's info along side on the same line

(1) is probably more future proof as it will allow adding more info later if needed but is more "UI disruptive" and harder to implement
(2 and 3) are more usable might have issues with fitting with long filenames and smaller terminals
(4) Is most informative but will make UI very busy

[drdo]

I think being able to see the first and last snapshots (and the dates) where the file exists would be useful.
Possibly also the latest snapshot where the item is the biggest (the one where it has the size that the UI shows).

In terms of where to show this I'm not so sure.

I could see a combination of 1 and 4 with some caveats.

For (4), two columns could be added to the UI with "first seen" and "last seen" (X days/weeks/months ago), but they would be shown conditionally, depending on how wide the terminal is (with "last seen" probably taking precedence over "first seen").

In addition to the UI changes this feature requires keeping more info on disk (e.g. the snapshot timestamps and the first/last/biggest snapshot for each item)

[eugenesan]

1st, I understand that this feature would require more storage but I believe sqlite buit-in compression will make the impact minimal.

2nd, I agree with everything regarding UI and info precedence with limited screen estate.

3rd, I personally would prefer seeing actual dates than "x days ago". In addition I use human readable tags for snapshots like "hostname-2024-04-01" and would prefer to see those. Maybe adding a shortcut to alternate between those 3 options is the solution.

[drdo]

I've made some changes in PR #25 regarding storage in preparation for this.

[eugenesan]

Thank you for your much appreciated work!

While reading #25 I recalled that at some point I wished we had a "flat" UI mode.
By flat I mean a mode we could switch to, where all files in the repo are displayed in a flat list and sorted by size.
Their location can displayed in the status bar when selected.
Optionally it would be useful to be able to "enter" each file as if it was a directory and show it's parent directory with the file being pre-selected.

To make it more usable with big repos, it would make sense to load the list page by page or to limit the list to a fixed number of object.

This "flat" mode should probably have it's own issue but I though it might be useful to mention it here since the implementation can be related to this feature.

P.S.
I hope my "ideas/requests" are not "too much". Feel free to ignore them ;-)

[drdo]

As a first step, PR #36 adds a popup window where you can see some details about the currently selected item.
Feel free to try it and let me know what you think.

This is included in release 0.2.0.

[eugenesan]

Seems to be working great.
The only minor issue is that there is no option to disable the pop-up.
Maybe pressing "Enter" again could remove it.

[drdo]

It can be disabled with Escape.

I should add that to the docs I suppose.