Re: RFC: On-line Content Filtering of directories

[Diego Gonzalez <diego pemas net>]

Ok

here are my views on the difference of the three methods, included are some of the reasons why i made this patch:

*) To reduce the depth of the directory tree that i used before spatial i had to place a lot of files under the
same directory, this makes it difficul to search for a specific file or set of them.

*) The typeahaed filtering only works in the list view mode, not in the Icon View, my filtering patch works on both, also 
currently typeahead (that is, if i press Ctrl+F on the list view) seems to be badly broken in HEAD, at least it doesn't
work for me.

If (it doesn't work for me, so i can't be sure about this fact) typeahead works in the same way as it works in the GtkTreeView it only matches the string entered agains the start of files and directories.

The other feature with which you press the first letter of a file and the view goes to the first file that starts with that letter
isn't enough most of the times (i'm talking about my particular use of nautilus)

*) The Ctrl+S feature is: a) difficult to use for a novel user that doesn't know what glob or regular expressions are, it requires him to know a new syntax and also what wildcards are (maybe this is not a problem since they have existed sincce MS-DOS), but i find it easier just to type one part of the name of the file/s that i'm looking for instead of wildcards and stuff.

*) Ctrl+S feature selects files, they can be spread in the list view which makes it really hard to know what you really selected if you have to scroll up and down to see what is selected.

*) The three mechanisms (glob selection and typeahead) are also limited to filename matching, this is obviosly not perfect, but as spatial almost forces you to put meaninful names to files it doesn't seem very limiting, often my file names have more than 50 characters in them.

*) As this feature has to be explicitly activated, i mean, to use it you have to press a button or a combination of keys and as the view looses the filtering when closing a window or hidding the filtering bar, I don't think it is that confusing as there is an explicit visual feedback (that is the filtering bar) telling the user that the contents of the directory are beeing filtered.

Diego