This relates a bit to an earlier thread about Skim’s pdfd files.
What I was wondering about was whether it would be possible/easy to have a flag on certain folders that you could set in order to treat them as “opaque” for the purposes of EagleFiler’s management – that is, to set a folder to be a “package” from EagleFiler’s perspective, even if it is not a package from the Finder’s perspective.
The reason I ask is that I’ve been doing a fair amount of work in LaTeX recently, which causes a mess of files to be created and recreated around the source file when it is rendered.
What I have been doing is this: iTeXMac2 defines a “.texd” package type, and, although I do not use iTeXMac2 (I use TeXShop), installing it allows me to create a folder, put a .tex file in it, and then rename the folder to end in “.texd” (causing a warning from the Finder, after which the folder becomes a package), then drop the folder/package into EagleFiler. Then, to edit the file, I find the package in EagleFiler, reveal it in the Finder, right-click to reveal package contents, and double-click on the .tex file within to open TeXShop.
This works well enough: EagleFiler doesn’t care about all of the .aux and .dvi files that appear within the .texd package, but will still notice when things have changed.
However, because the Finder/OS considers it to be a package, there are certain inconveniences that it causes. For example, the “revealed contents of the package” windows are not saved, so when the Finder is next started, those windows have to be re-opened. It is also nearly impossible to “Save as…” from any application into a package folder, and dragging a file from within a package folder onto, e.g., EagleFiler, results in an attempt to import the package rather than the file (this is something I do with the ultimately generated pdf file – at the moment, I have to copy it out to a regular folder, then import it into EagleFiler).
It would be nice if I could get the EagleFiler benefits of having a package folder (which is pretty much the only reason I put these things in .texd packages) without have the Finder/OS headaches of having a package folder. Although this might be the kind of thing that only 7 people in the world will use (and, admittedly, it might be a bit confusing as an option presented to the rest of the world, who will wonder what it means and what it’s for), it would be great if it is easy for the EagleFiler database to contain a flag that would tell EagleFiler to treat the folder as an unanalyzable atom.
As far as the UI implications, I guess the flag would have to be set from the Info inspector (and perhaps hidden unless an esoteric preference is turned on), and perhaps an indication in the records list (like a folder with a lock or package icon on it).
I don’t know whether this is easy or difficult, but if it’s easy, I’d find it useful. (Well, I’d find it useful if it were difficult too, but I’m not sure I’d find it enough more useful to justify the difficulty.)
One last note on this is that it is possible that this would simply be moot if EagleFiler could scan for orphaned files in the library (things that are there but EagleFiler didn’t know about previously), and I know that this has been on the “to do” (or at least the “to consider”) list for a while, so if that is still on its way, this “package flag” probably wouldn’t be worth the trouble.