Re: new run dialog

[Jonathan Blandford <jrb redhat com>]

Frank Worsley <fworsley shaw ca> writes:

> Hi Jonathan,
> 
> > I've been meaning to comment on your vfs patches for a while, but I
> > haven't been able to find the time to go through them closely enough.
> 
> That's ok. No worries. :)

Cool.

> >  1) I'd like to see us drop use of gconf keys for the helper apps as
> >     much as possible.  It seemed like you started in that direction, but
> >     then added the component viewer.  I'm not 100% sure what that is
> >     supposed to do.  Having multiple ways to configure helper
> >     applications is just confusing.
> 
> You need a component viewer because if a file has no default application
> but it does have a default component, then you need to pass that
> information to some app that can embed the component.
> 
> The component viewer can also be used to embed components in general.
> For example, instead of Nautilus embedding them within itself. That is
> not really needed, but some people were talking about making a general
> viewer app so I decided to add that in.
> 
> I could also just hardcode Nautilus as the component viewer, but that
> seems like a bad idea. I can understand why some people would not want
> to run Nautilus, so that option should remain.

Wacky.  This makes me think our component stuff needs work, then.  I can
imagine wanting this component viewer on a per-mime-type basis.  ie,
load image files in nautilus, but pdf files in ggv.  I'm not totally
sold on the need for this anyway especially in the absence of any
generic component viewer out there.  I really want to be extremely
conservative before adding more keys to gconf.

> > > 2. Command completion for known executables ala nautilus location bar.
> > 
> > Nice.  I've been wanting this for a while.  It would also be cool to
> > have it complete along the filesystem if you start the line with '~' or
> > '/'.  This way typing ~/myfile.txt or /usr/bin/gnome-terminal could be
> > completed.
> 
> Yeah that would be nice. I should look at the Nautilus code for that.
> The problem with the run dialog is that it's hard to figure out (on the
> fly) what kind of stuff the user is entering. Absolute path, relative
> path, relative to home dir, http url without the http://, or a command?

How about something like:

First, strip out all leading white space.

If the string begins with '~', '/' we autocomplete on filenames.
If the string begins with 'http://', we autocomplete on past URI's.
This can be extended to other URI's such as 'smb://', etc.

Finally, if it's just a normal word, autocomplete first on the past
history, then all commands, then finally files in the users home
directory.

Sound complicated enough?? (-:

> > All good stuff.  A lot of this should probably go into the dialog
> > independent of the state of the gnome-vfs stuff.
> 
> Most of it is independent of that. But duplicating the code from
> gnome-vfs/libgnome inside the run dialog to support showing urls would
> be quite the hassle.

Indeed.  I'll try to look at it tomorrow, and hopefully someone else can
read through it as well.

Thanks,
-Jonathan