Re: My Folders [Re: Special folders in gnome]

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Fri, 13 Jan 2006, HC Brugmans wrote:


> >>Name=My Pictures
> >      ^^^^^^^

> > Microsoft have finally [1] said they will drop the patronising "my"
> > prefix.  I hope you were using it only for example.

> > I'd much prefer if we could have
> > ~/Documents/
> >     /Templates/
> >     /Pictures/
> >     /Videos/

(extra suggestions removed)

> Please, Please, Please don't presume you can come up with a way that
> even the majority of users will like to organise their data.

I'm really not.  Sorry if it seemed that way.

The idea is to provide a suggestion, a gentle nudge for users who might
not otherwise bother to organise their files.

The default special folders should be limited to less than five I would
think. The intention is to provide only a few guide folders to get people
started.  It is all about affordance.

Recent versions of windows include quite a few of these, and Applications
do seem to add more later.

> I agree that ~/Music and such might be useful, but I'd personally rather
> see ~/media/music, (and ~/media/photos, tv, movies, ebooks etc)

Perhaps the system could be flexible enough to accommodate your needs
too but the intention is certainly not to constrain you.

I should have kept my example more succint and only mentioned the few
special folders already proposed and avoided any confusion.  Sorry about
that.

> ~/Documents/Slideshows/ for me would be useless, for one, since I prefer
> to have things like ~/documents/school/05-06/$subject/lectures/

I'd expect a Presentation application might want to add such a folder.  I
wouldn't presume for Gnome to preempt them.

There are however some people such as the security enhanced Linux
developers who are interested in restricting applications to their own
limited places where they could save files for security reasons.
(Knowing my luck I'll be on the receiving end of a supposedly "locked
down" kiosk or corporate desktop and be forced to use something like
this so I'm not going to encourage Gnome to aggressively enforce a
file heirarchy.)


> My mother uses a default archiving scheme based on file format, which
> means that she will have her administration over the year spread into
> half a dozen folders. She likes it that way. I could absolutely not work
> that way.
> Don't force either her or me to change my prefered way of working to
> enjoy goodness.

I do hope that doesn't happen I hope I have made my intentions clearer.

Anyone know of any case insensative file systems for Linux like HFS for
the Mac?  Perhaps there is HFS for Linux already thanks to Darwin?  I
should like to give it a try sometime.

> My father uses caps in every folder and file, I hate caps in filenames
> whereever for whatever reason, these are the kind of differences you'll
> run into.

Incidentally I did a straw poll and while back and noticed that of the
very few people I know who do use the command line quite a bit an even
smaller subgroup also use case to futher disambiguate (F)olders and
(f)iles because it can be helpful when using command line completion.

> Providing a default is ok, but allow this to be changed, renamed,
> reorganised and adjusted to user preferences.

Let us wait and see.

This idea has been brought up many times but fizzled out before much
happened because there were so many details which couldn't possible be
gotten right all at once.  I'm really glad to see Mandrake took a risk and
tried something, even if they cannot please everyone it will be a good
first step and could gradually evolve into something most people are
satisified with.

Sincerely

Alan Horkan
http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/