Feature: Switch to single instance with multi-windowing support

[heftymouse]

What feature or improvement do you think would benefit Files?

Currently, each instance of Files only supports a single main window (in App.Window), and tab tear-off is implemented by starting a new instance through URI activation. Allowing multiple windows will make this faster and more lightweight and opens the door to having only one instance of Files running at a time (like explorer).

Requirements

• This proposal will allow a single app instance to have multiple main windows.

Files Version

2.5.1.0

Windows Version

10.0.25387.1200

Comments

This will be a very large effort

[yaira2]

@heftymouse is this something you looked into? It might be worth identifying what it'll involve and what challenges we can expect to encounter.

[heftymouse]

@heftymouse is this something you looked into? It might be worth identifying what it'll involve and what challenges we can expect to encounter.

It'll require refactoring anything that requires access to the current window like dialogs and file pickers. I have some idea of how to implement this using a service scope for each tab's dialog/file picker service. However it'll be a challenge to make that work in a clean way, since XAML doesn't have a good way to pass data to distant children.

[heftymouse]

Blocker: microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml#7282
It's apparently being worked on for 1.5 according to this, we'll see if anything comes out of it

[yaira2]

Can we workaround by using Binding?

[heftymouse]

Even if we could, it certainly wouldn't be worth it