Re: Killing views [Was: Dealing with files in Gnome]

[Ali Akcaagac <aliakc web de>]

On Wednesday 02 April 2003 14:27, Julien Olivier wrote:
> Yes, I know that. But that's only theory. In practice, konqueror IS
> crippled. For example, it has a location bar, previous/next icons which
> come from the fact that it may be a web navigator. It has a "print" icon
> which is useless when browsing your files etc...

How I see it:

I think that the Locationbar, Previous/Next and Print are indeed important 
features for a Filemanager.

- Locationbar to quickly enter where you want to dive e.g. cut&paste a 
location from a textfile or from somewhere else or for fast entering the 
location you want to go. Or if you dive into some directory then you get 
phoned up and come back, then you don't know where you are. For me a 
Locationbar is really important and necessary to know where I am.

Example: /bin /sbin /usr/bin /usr/sbin /usr/local/bin /usr/local/sbin 
/usr/X11R6/bin /usr/libexec /usr/local/libexec /opt/<whatever>/ ...

They all sound similar and are valid locations for binary files. I like to 
know where I am and not GUESS where I am. I hope that Nautilus is not the 
first Filemanager that you have met in your life because every Filemanager 
that I know of and have used on my personal own offered features like this in 
the one or other way.

- Previous/Next is indeed important specially in cooperation with the 
Locationbar. Say I enter ftp://ftp.gnu.org/ and then later Localhost:// or 
something like this browsing on my own System looking if I have a new file or 
not then it's easier to press Previous or search for a Dropdownbox in the 
Locationbar to quickly select or go back to ftp.gnu.org rather than 
re-entering it.

- Print is necessary if you want a list with files printed out e.g. Filesizes, 
Dates, Attributes etc.

> Of course, that's just my personal opinion and I also feel that Nautilus
> has herited some UI crippling from the time where it was a web
> browser...

Well from what I know Nautilus was meant to be a Desktop Shell. It still does 
more than a simple Filemanager imo but that is also personal taste. I don't 
see any UI crippling in Nautilus but I still see that it needs a lot of 
polish, enchancements and fixups.

> Now if you say that GNOME needs a plugin-embedder comparable to
> konqueror, why not but then I need a file manager that does what its
> name claims: manage files.

Well Konqueror is no plugin-embedder - it uses Plugins offered by other 
applications e.g. If I write an eDonkey plugin for KDE then I can use it in 
ANY applications including Konqueror that gives it the powers. Plugins should 
be used globally on the system e.g. shared with other applications. That's 
what besides others Bonobo was meant for but somehow never came seriously 
into action. Nautilus views as the name implies are Bonobo implementions into 
Nautilus only and can't be used over the whole System

Try this http://www.nongnu.org/gcmd/ maybe you gonna like it.

> I just don't like hybrid apps because their ployvalence is often
> compensated by bad UI design.

Why ? Nautilus does the same, whenever I start the GThumb view inside it then 
it adds required elements into the Toolbar, the same should be possible with 
other applications. Think Konqueror as two different applications a 
filemanager and a webbrowser, two different icons on your panel to start it. 
You don't realize it to be only one application. In the case for Nautilus we 
should do the same due to the Views and GNOME-VFS it's more, a network 
browser, ftp browser, application browser, preferences browser and so on. But 
it would be cool if it was done 'more correctly' in a global way. Say I write 
an eDonkey application for GNOME then it makes usage of e2dk:// whenever I 
click on such a link in the browser or whenever I write a sql:// application 
that It gonna start some sort of query analyzer.

And I like to tell you my very personal opinion here too, I very much prefer 
to how Konqueror works than how Nautilus works, integrates and operates and I 
would really appreciate if people start to FINALLY decide what Nautilus and 
other components on GNOME should be meant to be, as long as things are not 
really decided as long people can't start developing, fixing, implementing, 
reaching these decided targets. I like to add one final sentence here. I do 
respect the people working on Nautilus and I very much appreciate their work 
on it and of course Nautilus is being worked on but if we view it from the 
process 2.0 release towards 2.2.1 then nothing special had happened. For me 
Nautilus 2.2.1 is as exciting to use as 2.0 and I rarely errr. never use it.