This is more of a musing, but in Windows Explorer, and IDEs like Eclipse, I often end up with a file tree that is expanded so many levels deep, I cannot see both the root and the files I'm working on in the same horizontal space.
Is there a better way to represent hierarchy without requiring arbitrary levels of indentation?
edited to add context: I'm looking for a directory/file view panel to go on the left side of an IDE, really.
Look at how the macOS does it using panels. Fixed height with scroll bars and it moves left-right as you click through. I used this for a similar situation last year. Additionally, you could represent the current position using bread crumbs.
Secondly, check out the new address bar in file management in Windows 7. It creates drop down boxes for each level in the address. So it basically maintains the position in the address and doubles as interface to navigate.
I hope this is helpful.
Yes, you can collapse in a bunch of ways.
IntelliJ's IDEA shows class hierarchies in a treeview, but an option will collapse intermediary levels and shows them as a single item (com.sun.java.foo) instead of multiple levels (com/ containing sun/ containing java/ containing foo/).
You could also use some sort of ellipsis if you don't care about the content of the intermediate levels (com.[...].foo). Generally ellipses like this get expanded in a tooltip when moused over.
You could split the area, to show both root and files.
Really it depends on what task you are trying to do that requires seeing both of these items. Are you searching for something? Organizing? Moving files around? Or do you just want context?
