Re: the Nautilus context menu

[Alan Horkan <horkana tcd ie>]

On 19 Nov 2002, Calum Benson wrote:

> Date: 19 Nov 2002 19:52:29 +0000
> From: Calum Benson <calum benson sun com>
> To: desktop-devel-list gnome org, usability-list gnome org
> Subject: Re: the Nautilus context menu
>
> On Wed, 2002-11-13 at 19:32, Andrew Sobala wrote:
>
> > It doesn't seem worth alienating skilled computer users in an effort to
> > make file management seem as simple as pie - which it isn't.
>
> One counter-argument to this is that skilled computer users almost
> certainly don't use the menus for most of their copying and pasting

developers and really advanced users would use scripting

knowledgable users (say for example non-programmer competant office
workers) would probably use cut and paste.
I am desperately lazy and would like to be more advanced about this but i
am not going to go to the effort for writing a script to do this but
usually i am content with a few simple commands in the terminal, but
ideally the easy to use desktop would be powerful that i could click and
drool my way through this without ever needing to open a terminal.

Newbies might not even think to right click (nor are Mac addicts
particularly likely to either if and when they use Gnome), and i suspect
would painfully move each file one by one.  I will have to figure out how
to spy on my parents computing habits.

I vaguely recall being told that a massive proportion of user time is
spent just moving files about the place (something huge like 2/3), and i
ponder a system where the filesystem is irrelevant, abstracted away fromt
the user and your files are 'Just there', somebody must have prototyped
something alone these lines.  Email for example does not make you name and
save every file, it just puts it in a predefined home dir/inbox, or sorts
it based on filters.  Most people dont enjoy the neatly filing this in an
orderly manner, and unless you have a great big "My Documents"
leading them (or in my case docs/, work/ images/ videos/ mp3s/ ) i
may not even occure to them to organise their files rather that having
hunderds of files all dumped in their home directory or desktop.