Show contents of any present README.md (or README) files in directory window

[sirnewton01]

This is inspired by GitHub and other systems like BitBucket. When you open a directory window, if there is a README.md (markdown) or README (plain text) then put its contents below the list of files in the directory. The contents of the readme can be modified, but won't be saved.

/Users/cmcgee/git/someProject/ Del Snarf Get | Look Edit 
----------------------------------------------------------
a.js              b.js
package.json      README.md

This project has some amazing JavaScript code that can be used to calculate Pi to 500 decimal places on a PDP-8 emulator in your web browser.

To build this project:
npm run build

When using edwood for development work, this can be really useful to get an overview of the directory you're looking at saving a few clicks and an extra window to have the readme open. Also, if the README is structured for it might have some useful command line for building/testing/running the project that can be invoked inline. Double left click to the right of the command line and then middle click to run.

I already do something similar to this by adding extra lines on the window line. But, these disappear every time that I happen to close the window. This kind of functionality also encourages magic recipes to be stored in source control and shared with everyone.

[rjkroege]

This is an interesting idea. I'm also wondering if it's conceivably feature creep. I'm wondering if we could have a general mechanism to have external helper programs generate file content in certain circumstances.

Conveniently, we may already have at least some of that system in the plumber. Maybe you could achieve this with the plumber? If so, please update the issue and share how you did it.

[sirnewton01]

Feature creep is something I hope to avoid. My argument for including it out of the box is that it could probably be achieved with minimal impact to the complexity of the code and it would save users the extra gestures, window space to access project information plus commonly used commands. I see it as enabling the readme files as a project dashboard of sorts. Given that there is no way for a project to customize window headers in acme/edwood.

Plumber is an interesting idea. I didn't realize that plumber was involved in directory listings. If I discover a way to do what I'm proposing above I'll post it.

[rjkroege]

My imprecise recollection is that Edwood asks the plumber what to do when you click on a directory and then falls back to generating the directory listing. It's worth at least looking into.