Basic keyboard navigation issues

Using TestDisk to undelete files
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filofax
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Joined: 11 Aug 2014, 09:23

Basic keyboard navigation issues

#1 Post by filofax »

TestDisk 7.0 on Mac OS X – I wonder why this hasn't come up already, search did make something relevant show up anyway.
I have problems with basic keyboard navigation in the file undelete/copy screen.
(1) Is there a possibility to scroll screen by screen? I have a 1 TB HD which got formatted by a satellite receiver accidentally, containing several thousand entries to files which are long deleted. I only want to get at some of the most recent, so at the moment it seems that I have to scroll down line by line, file by file to get to the end of the list. I acutually put a little weight on the down arrow key and went of for breakfeast. It took a good half an hour to get to the end of the list. There should be some key combo to make scrolling screen by screen possible. N or p doesn't do a thing.
(2) Now having reached the files I am interested in, the screen help tells me to hit : (the colon key) to select a file. There is however no visual clue that a file got selected, so being on a German keyboard I am not even sure that hitting the colon even does anything. Switching to the US keyboard layout does not help either. I'd very much to be able to select a batch of files and copy them to a new destination in one push.

Any pointers are highly appreciated. Thanks!

filofax
Posts: 5
Joined: 11 Aug 2014, 09:23

Re: Basic keyboard navigation issues

#2 Post by filofax »

As an addition to my own post I observed two things yesterday:
(1) Speeding up the keyboard repetition in the Mac's System Preferences' Keyboard settings vastly improves the scrolling experience. Mine was set very low, so scrolling literally took ages.
(2) It seems that selected items in the file list are supposed to turn green. This works for not deleted files, but deleted files stubbornly stay red. Even though, the rescuing itself works.

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Fiona
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Re: Basic keyboard navigation issues

#3 Post by Fiona »

(1) Is there a possibility to scroll screen by screen? I have a 1 TB HD which got formatted by a satellite receiver accidentally, containing several thousand entries to files which are long deleted.
Did you try to scroll using the page up and down key?
Page up, on a keyboard without the Page Up key is fn-up arrow; and Page down is fn-down arrow.
At least something to try?
The undelete feature is only intended to recover recently deleted files.
I didn't try to undelete files of an accidentally formatted disk.
Might be possible that you have to recover your previous partition first?

Fiona

filofax
Posts: 5
Joined: 11 Aug 2014, 09:23

Re: Basic keyboard navigation issues

#4 Post by filofax »

Fiona wrote:
(1) Is there a possibility to scroll screen by screen? I have a 1 TB HD which got formatted by a satellite receiver accidentally, containing several thousand entries to files which are long deleted.
Did you try to scroll using the page up and down key?
Page up, on a keyboard without the Page Up key is fn-up arrow; and Page down is fn-down arrow.
At least something to try?
The undelete feature is only intended to recover recently deleted files.
I didn't try to undelete files of an accidentally formatted disk.
Might be possible that you have to recover your previous partition first?

Fiona
Tried lots of keys, including page up and down plus modifiers. No response.

My problem is not about undeleting. The undeleting itself worked quite well.
The problem is that I select a range of files and that there is no visual feedback whatsoever, that these files got selected. You have to work blindly.
Living files in the file system (normally display as white) turn green on selection, deleted directory entries stubbornly stay red. Which is clearly a bug IMHO.

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cgrenier
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Re: Basic keyboard navigation issues

#5 Post by cgrenier »

I have uploaded a new 7.0-WIP. Can you tell me if you can now see the difference between selected and non-selected deleted files ?

filofax
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Joined: 11 Aug 2014, 09:23

Re: Basic keyboard navigation issues

#6 Post by filofax »

cgrenier wrote:I have uploaded a new 7.0-WIP. Can you tell me if you can now see the difference between selected and non-selected deleted files ?
Thanks for your upload!

There is an albeit minimal difference which is only barely visible if I select all files: deleted files are in a darkish, greyish red, when selected the red becomes a tad more bright. Invisible for single files. I changed my terminal's color settings using the available presets but no change.

Again, living files turn green.

I don't see a way to append a screen shot which I could easily provide.

Apart from that issue: in my own in-house software I also like to use red and green in my interfaces. But it's a nightmare for color vision impaired people.

I wonder if it wouldn't be easier to add a * or something to the beginning of each selected line and not bother with colors.

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cgrenier
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Re: Basic keyboard navigation issues

#7 Post by cgrenier »

New version uploaded: when selected, both deleted and non-deleted files turns green and are prefixed by '*'.
Can you try it ?

filofax
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Joined: 11 Aug 2014, 09:23

Re: Basic keyboard navigation issues

#8 Post by filofax »

Thanks! This works – apart from the fact, that now all files, living and deleted, are now initially displayed in red – which is, IMHO, not ideal. The previous display in white and red was better.

Perhaps I should open another thread on this, but I'd like to point out an other problematic issue: When undeleting files, currently, if two identically named files are undeleted, the one that is undeleted later silently overwrites the one undeleted earlier. I don't think this is a good solution. On the other hand, I am not sure what may be a good solution. Maybe testdisk should detect file name collisions in advance and ask the user what to do in that case. An automatic solution might even be to append the file creation (or modification?) date to the end of the respective file names in the event of a file collision.

Thanks!

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cgrenier
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Re: Basic keyboard navigation issues

#9 Post by cgrenier »

The all in red problem should be fixed. Looks like it was not a good idea to test this patch with only deleted files ;-(

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