Windows usability improvements - seeking feedback

[vivainio]

I've been using lf on both Windows and Linux and ran into several friction points when trying to share a single config file between platforms. I've put together a draft PR (#2418) with a set of changes that address these, and wanted to check whether there's appetite for this kind of improvement before investing more time polishing it.

What the PR addresses

• Dot file hiding on Windows: zh now hides files starting with . in addition to the Windows FILE_ATTRIBUTE_HIDDEN attribute, matching Linux behavior
• Shell flag auto-correction: when shell is set to sh/bash (common with Git Bash), the default /c shellflag is automatically corrected to -c
• Shebang-aware script execution: previewer/cleaner scripts with a #!/bin/sh shebang are automatically run through the configured shell instead of failing with "executable not found"
• Relative path and env var expansion for previewer, cleaner, rulerfile, and source

Motivation

The overall goal is to make it practical to share one lfrc and one previewer script between Windows and Linux without platform-specific wrappers. Currently users need separate config files or .cmd wrapper scripts to work around these issues.

As a concrete example, my own config at https://github.com/vivainio/dotfiles/blob/master/lf is now shared between Windows and Linux with no platform-specific files.

PR: #2418

Happy to split into separate PRs per change, add tests, or adjust the approach based on feedback.

[CatsDeservePets]

Hello @vivainio!
First of all: Thanks for trying to help making lf better.

I reviewed your PR and added some comments (I hope I did not sound too harsh).

As someone who also has to switch between Windows and macOS, I know the burden of having to configure everything twice. I just accepted it at some point as there are just too many differences (be it available tools, paths, ...).

In my experience, Windows will always be an afterthought for tools like lf. It never fully works, be it problems with path separators, line endings or other OS specific quirks.
Things get even more complicated when trying to re-introduce Unix tooling (i.e. shells) to Windows versions. Using .exe applications through WSL always seems to be a hit-and-miss. Some handle it better than others. One of the problems is, things like runtime.GOOS don't magically change inside the compiled executable. Even worse, one can run both the Windows and the Linux executable from within WSL.

Admittedly, I never bothered using a Unix shell inside the Windows version of lf, I just use pwsh. However, in theory you should be able to use on-init to handle OS dependent configuration like different paths or settings.

Your PR tries to solve many different things at once. Most of them are rather specific to your special use-case of working around the limitations of coupling Unix and Windows tools.

I also do not see a point in hiding dot-files on Windows by default when you can just add the following to your lfrc:

set hiddenfiles ".*"

Edit: Looking into your linked dotfiles repo, you already had this kind of OS detection in the past. To be honest, I think this is as good as it gets. I am not sure how many users actually have this problem you are trying to solve. Most Windows users are using cmd or pwsh and if they really want the Unix experience, they will most likely install the actual Linux version inside WSL.