Allow grouping projects together in tree-like structure in Project Manager

[revanj]

Describe the project you are working on:
A project where player teleports between different worlds. (I believe the project content is not relevant)

Describe the problem or limitation you are having in your project:
Because I have quite a lot of projects (6, plus all the demos that comes with Godot on steam), it becomes increasing hard to find the right project in my project manager.
Describe the feature / enhancement and how it helps to overcome the problem or limitation:
A tree like structure for grouping projects in project manager, reorder and change structure by mouse drags.
Describe how your proposal will work, with code, pseudocode, mockups, and/or diagrams:
Change Project manager to use a tree-like UI element.
If this enhancement will not be used often, can it be worked around with a few lines of script?:
No.
Is there a reason why this should be core and not an add-on in the asset library?:
It's the project manager and is not that easy to create plugin or add-on.

Note: I'm willing to PR for this.

[Zireael07]

Would be very helpful especially for the demos coming with Godot :)

[ReturnMinusOne]

I myself have filed a near-identical issue, and was just directed to this thread.

I agree that a tree structure naturally becomes necessary as more projects are created and new Godot releases are made available.

[Xananax]

One workaround is to associate .godot files with Godot and use the system's file browser

[ReturnMinusOne]

Thank you, that does certainly help. I'm not sure that was possible with previous versions, but it's nice to see the possibility is there now.

[Malkverbena]

Any update for this propose?

[Calinou]

Any update for this propose?

To my knowledge, nobody is currently working on implementing this feature. We don't even seem to have any mockups designed yet.

I'd recommend creating a mockup or several to show how the feature could look in action, because it's not very clear right now.

There are some open questions:

• Should categories be nestable? Supporting nesting adds a lot of complexity to the feature's implementation, and may not be used often.
• Should projects be allowed to be part of no category, or is there a "uncategorized" category?
• Should there be an alternative way to recategorize projects without using drag-and-drop? If so, what would it look like?

[KoBeWi]

I've been thinking about this recently. An alternative proposal was to simply add project tags (like labels on GitHub probably) and allow filtering/sorting by tag etc. Not sure if that's enough to resolve this proposal though.

[Calinou]

I've been thinking about this recently. An alternative proposal was to simply add project tags (like labels on GitHub probably) and allow filtering/sorting by tag etc. Not sure if that's enough to resolve this proposal though.

I'd personally prefer this approach as I find it more flexible (a project can have several tags). There's still the question of whether tags should be part of project.godot, or part of your editor settings. One of them is in version control, the other isn't.

If we add tags to version control, we can make it so all demos project have the same tag. We will probably also want to restrict what characters you can use in tags, so that different projects are more likely to use the same tag (similar to GitHub's topics feature, where tags can only be written like-this).

[KoBeWi]

Well, we do already have project description, which AFAIK is only used in project manager, so tags make sense as part of the project I guess 🤔

[Malkverbena]

@KoBeWi

I've been thinking about this recently. An alternative proposal was to simply add project tags (like labels on GitHub probably) and allow filtering/sorting by tag etc. Not sure if that's enough to resolve this proposal though.

A tag system is interesting for organizing projects, but it doesn't reduce the mess in the project manager, which is the big problem in itself. The long list of projects.

@Calinou

Should categories be nestable? Supporting nesting adds a lot of complexity to the feature's implementation, and may not be used often.

I don't see nesting as being critical. But to have some feedback from others would be enlightening.

Should projects be allowed to be part of no category, or is there a "uncategorized" category?

For sure!

Should there be an alternative way to recategorize projects without using drag-and-drop? If so, what would it look like?

Maybe a popup menu?

[dalexeev]

• Related Add color tags to the project manager #2329

Mockups

[KoBeWi]

I think long list of projects is not a problem in itself if you can find the project you are looking for. Tags solve this problem, you can sort of fake tree structure by assigning specific tags and sorting by them. Filtering by tag will show you only projects in one category. We could probably have reverse filtering for hiding categories.

Anyway, a way to organize projects have suggested for years:
godotengine/godot#35905
godotengine/godot#8167
godotengine/godot#6105
Most proposals mention tags in some form. I think we should go with a single solution, so if we were to have a tree structure, someone must implement it first and demonstrate its advantages over tags.