Re: [Nautilus-list] Re: GNOME user environment brainstorming

[John Sullivan <sullivan spies com>]

on 5/24/01 8:31 PM, Havoc Pennington at hp redhat com wrote:

> 
> John Kodis <kodis jagunet com> writes:
>> On Thu, May 24, 2001 at 03:48:04PM -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote:
>> 
>>> There's some possible confusion about shortcut buttons on panel vs. on
>>> desktop, especially since panel icons require single-click, desktop
>>> double-click.
>> 
>> It's already possible to configure Nautilus to activate desktop icons
>> on a single click.  I much prefer this because of its simplicity and
>> because of its consistancy with panel icons, menu items, hyperlinks,
>> and most everything else.
>> 
>> Requiring a double click might be reasonable if there were some common
>> action bound to a single click.  Lacking that, however, this default
>> seems poorly choosen.
>> 
> 
> The rationale for double is presumably that you can select
> icons. e.g. I can select an icon, then shift-select others and perform
> some operation on them. Or I can select then hit the shortcut for
> Rename. etc.
> 
> Havoc

Exactly, single-click does have a common action -- selection. It's probably
the case that activating an icon is the most common action by far, but
without selection you can't do any of the other icon-based tasks (rename,
show properties, move to trash, cut/copy, etc.).

You can also select icons with rubberband-selection (drag a box around
them), but this is much less discoverable.

You can also do (at least most of) these icon-based tasks with the
right-click menu, but not everybody knows about the right-click menu, as
there is no visual cue that it exists.

Nautilus originally had single-click to activate as the default. Then we did
user testing with some non-GNOME users, and asked them to rename a file. It
was a disaster, mostly due to the single-click activation. So we changed the
default to double-click to activate.

John