Add 3 letter or more suffix to directories instead of letter only when roms exceed letter directory limit

[ddcruver]

Is your feature request related to a problem?

A1, A2 is not very descriptive to finding roms, maybe more can be done to make it easier to find games.

Describe the solution you'd like

A separate parameter "--dir-letter-range-label" (or something similar) can be added to go along with existing properties:
--dir-letter Append the first letter of the ROM name as an output subdirectory [boolean]
--dir-letter-limit [int]

This parameter will instruct the directory name to be the 3 or more character range of the directory. So something like AAA-ADX, ADY-AMA, AMA-AZZ.

Additional context

No response

[emmercm]

This makes sense. I've also thought about adding an option to group multiple letters together, as in:

A-F/
G-Q/
R-Z/

in the way that HTGD SMDBs do. My personal opinion is the single letters are more useful, but to each their own.

[ddcruver]

I could see grouping single letters based on a different factor would be good feature to add as well. i.e. min roms for a directory to be listed alone (if the next one isn't a big one itself) that is a confusing rule but wouldn't want a little directory to be grouped with a big one. Only group adjacent small directories.

I would have a hard time remembering which directory I should navigate to A1, A2, A3, A4 to but it would be confusing if you wanted to hand your device to a friend to show way to big rom collection :)

[ddcruver]

I looked at your HTGD example afterword but even if you extended it a little it would be useful too, like A-G with all listed in there either single letters or the prefixes I mentioned as well. So you could easily get to Z with less clicks.

├───A-G
│ ├───A
│ │ ├───AA-AF
│ │ └───AG-AZ
│ ├───B
│ ├───C
│ ├───D
│ ├───E
│ ├───F
│ └───G
├───C-Q
└───R-Z

I know they don't add the single letter directories but when navigating on a handheld emulator with limited to no search capabilities/no keyboard, I believe it would be useful to have that.

[ddcruver]

I don't have nearly enough time to implement it but if you could point me to the "directory determining" code I would like to see if I could take a shot at implementing a few methods of sorting over my vacation.

[emmercm]

Sorry, I typed out a nearly full response and never hit the send button...

In the case of SMDBs, you wouldn't want to use any of the --dir-letter* options, because it would produce confusing directory trees like you have there. I meant that it might be a good feature to be able to produce a similar directory structure for non-SMDB DATs, such as No-Intro ones. SMDBs also sort by category, so that part wouldn't be possible with other DATs.

---

I started working on this on a plane yesterday, I'm proposing two new options:

• --dir-letter-count <number=1> which lets you control how many leading letters to use, right now it's only the first letter
• --dir-letter-group which will let you group ROMs into range folders like you're proposing here, and it will require --dir-letter-limit

[ddcruver]

An alternative idea would just be to increase the letter count of the ranges for each sub directory, unless a single item of the parent directory range would have less than the limit. I don't think you would like how that would end up because it would be similar to my example.

You may never have something ranges with of more then 4 letters unless you had a dir-letter-limit set too low and/or there was you had a game with lots of sequals, versions, languages. Maybe a letter count limit would make more sense where it would ignore the dir-letter-limit if the case was hit. I just don't like the ideal of a MARIO 1, MARIO 2 directories.

[emmercm]

Agreed, a --dir-letter-count of larger than about 3 probably doesn't make sense, but people could do it if they want.

I'm not sure I fully understood your response, it was fairly dense with information. So I'll restate what I'm thinking and see if it makes sense to you.

---

igir [commands..] --dir-letter --dir-letter-limit 1000 --dir-letter-group

would create subdirectories with 1,000 ROMs each, which might result in something like:

A-F/
G-Q/
R-Z/

and then the number of letters could be controlled like this:

igir [commands..] --dir-letter --dir-letter-limit 1000 --dir-letter-group --dir-letter-count 3

to produce something like you had in the first post:

AAA-FOO/
FOP-QUA/
QUB-ZZZ/

[emmercm]

Feature implemented in #900.

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