Typed Folders (WAS -- Special folders in gnome)

[Nathaniel McCallum <npmccallum gentoo org>]

On Fri, 2006-01-13 at 09:21 +0100, Mattias Eriksson wrote:
> In gnome we currently have a situation where some folders are special,
> like Templates, Pictures and Music. Those are user visible folders that
> in some case have the folder names hard coded in English.

This made me think of something that I've always wanted to see in
Nautilus: typed folders.  What do I mean by that?  First, lets look at
some problems that appear with folders in general.

~/Music: Not only is this a "special" folder, but it is handled
differently by different music apps.  Options like "import into library"
in Rhythmbox and Banshee work differently.  Just recently I was trying
different players (RB and Banshee) and I opened up the ~/Music folder to
find that I had two copies of every file!  I certainly didn't desire
this.

~/Photos or ~/Pictures: Same as ~/Music, special directory structure
with different meanings to different apps.

The idea of typed folders is to have folders that have hooks in them on
various actions.  For example:
 - double click on the ~/Music folder it opens your music management app
 - drop a file onto the folder ~/Music and it adds it to the music
   library
 - You can have more than one music library, with different music in 
   each.
 - you could have a folder for a virtual machine that contains the hard 
   drive image, settings, etc.  when you double click it, it starts
   that virtual machine
 - drag the cdrom onto the VM folder and the cdrom is mounted on the 
   virtual machine
 - the folder "type" can display a default emblem or an entirely 
   different icon.  This is somewhat similar to the '.app' folders on
   Macs
 - hide files within the folder (ala '.hidden')
 - Remove "Magic" folder names: because they are "typed" you can name
   them whatever you want, type is just an extra bit of metadata. The   
   other advantage is that you can move the folders and nothing breaks.

Thus, the "specialness" of a folder is not determined by its name or
path, but by the metadata associated with it.  This metadata could just
be a .desktop file with the same name as the folder or some other
mechanism.

Anyway, it may be a bad idea, but I thought it was cool at least.

Nathaniel