I just discovered that once the .gramps or .gpkg file extension is associated with Gramps in Windoze, that Gramps will launch, create a new blank Tree (named following the target file) and import it when the file is double-clicked in the OS.
(There are a couple idiosyncrasies: Gramps will mindlessly create identically named Trees, it doesn’t work if Gramps is already open.)
Does this work the same on Linux & macOS?
And do the installers set filetype associations for our dedicated filetypes?
And does it do so for any OTHER known & importable filetypes that are not already associated? Particularly & specifically, for .ged GEDCOM filetype.
It is wonderful that this capability already exists in Gramps from the OS but baffling that it is not accessible from the GUI. Just making the Import file menu item available when no Tree is loaded and tying in an import file selection dialog would make Gramps less confusing to newbies.
The OS “double-click open by file extension” option bypasses the whole string of “what do I do now?” stumbling blocks: create a tree, Name the new tree or hit enter (so the ‘load’ button undims), load the tree, import a file. Shouldn’t the GUI be just as easy?
I can only speak for Linux, where it is the same as you wrote, at least for .gramps, .gpkg, and GEDCOM. And another annoying thing is, that during the import, you don’t see much of a GUI, so you have no idea about what’s happening, until the import completes.
I agree that we should also have an import into a new tree option, to avoid further confusion. Many of our competites have that, including the Dutch Aldfaer program that was just mentioned in another thread.
And personally, for double clicks, I’d rather see a dialog, that asks whether the user really wants to create a new tree from the associated file.
Just as an extension of your observation that there is no feedback that the import is occurring…
The absolute newbie has an additional layer of no feedback. The initialization launch of Gramps has to compile & cache all the Python code. So the 1st launch has a minute (or more) where the user thinks that the application has locked up or is doing malicious things. Subsequent launches are MUCH more snappy.
The PortableApps fork (PortableGramps for Win32) solves this with a sublauncher application that pops nearly instantly with a pretty vanity dialog showing the Gramps icon, credits, & monitoring progress with feedback. The dialog goes away when all is initialized.
Last time I did an install on Windows, it looked like the installer did a compile. But even then, you also depend on Windows caching the compiled files.
After this percolated for a while, a couple thoughts brewed up. Gramps pops up a lot of dialogs and it gets tedious to keep dismissing “are you sure” confirmations.
It seems like it would be better just to DO what the OS double-click asked but offer bailout opportunities. Sure, it might waste CPU cycles & do a bit of drive thrashing. But that human convenience is worth the extra wear&tear for the computer.
So if the import had a progress dialog with an Abort button (which would not only cancel the import but also flush the newborn partially populated tree) and it just added incremental “copy #” suffixes to the tree names, then Gramps could just get to work.
And, of course, the progress dialog should NOT require a click at the end, it should just finish & dismiss. On a new import, it doesn’t even need to pop up the post-import stats dialog. You can run the Stats report if you’re curious.
This assumes that Gramps would not consider an import into a new Tree to be “too important” to abort. (It is REALLY annoying when Gramps tells me a custom filter or a backup is too important to abort. Which happens all too often when I need to do a quick shut down.)
I once read that “are you sure” dialogs are a sign of insecure programmers, and users shouldn’t be bothered with their insecurity, so I see the point of just importing, and adding a sequence number behind the name.
I make no backups on exit, so your other point doesn’t bother me much, except for what I already wrote in the performance thread. And what I wrote there is one of the reasons why I’m still on version 3.4.9.
On MacOS, no default actions are set up for .gramps , or .gpkg.
The .ged extension is like .txt and is assigned to open the TextEdit app. I do not know if Gramps set that up or if some other genealogy program I might have had did it.