Re: My Critics about nautilus

[Kalle Vahlman <kalle vahlman gmail com>]

On Thu, 30 Sep 2004 14:51:14 +0200, Ingo Ruhnke <grumbel gmx de> wrote:
> Kalle Vahlman <kalle vahlman gmail com> writes:
> 
> > The three-dots-cut is useless if you have some periodic data which has
> > a common prefix.
> 
> Display the fullname in a tooltip when you mouse-over.

You worry about scrolling too much but you are willing to hover over
your hunderd NicePrefix...-files one by one to find the on that is
named "NicePrefix-123345r.plop"? Doesn't sound like a good trade-off
to me.

> > ...which also ignores the fact that preview icons are not always the
> > same size as the  folder icons.
> Even with preview-icons Nautilus is still wasting a whole damn lot of
> space just for nothing.

The space is to ensure that the largest possible previevew icon
doesn't screw the alignment. I don't see how this could be otherwise,
unless
1) The previews are never bigger than other icons (or more precise,
all icons are the same size), this would be bad IMO, I like the big
pictures
2) it's calculated from the largest icon visible, which would result
in having two windows with different spacing between icons and still
would result in what you call nothing in between.
 
> >> the current icon layout is by far to wide, making it extremly hard to
> >> browse larger directories, since to much scrolling is needed.
> > I can't imagine how your konqueror and rox images fit say 1000 images
> > on that same area, you still need to scroll like crazy (unless you use
> > type-to-find)
> rox and konq can display my home-directory completly without scrolling
> in a singel window, Nautilus can't. Same so with many other
> directories.

Yes, nautilus doesn't have smallicon view.
 
> > and I guess it's besides the point to actually see what the file
> > contents is (instead of just the name).
> smalliconview in Rox still provides thumbnails, even with hundreds of
> files on a single screen.

And those are surely of true value, I'm sure.
 
> > Fair enough. I was actually thinking the smallicons view, but now I
> > have a faint memory that it was dumped a loooong time ago (IIRC due
> > to being unmaintained or something), correct me if I'm wrong.
> As far as I know there never was a smallicon view, at least not in the
> release versions, not sure what happened in CVS.

May be that I'm on crack, may be that it was some other view. I don't
know which.
 
> > But it's not really fair to make nautilus look deliberately bad.
> Well its one of the major reasons Nautilus is relativly useless for
> me.

Because it looks like shit (sorry) when the labels are on the side and
in the "tight" layout mode? When in fact, with the normal layout and
text below the icons the same view would look far better.

> > The same view with text below the icons is far more organized than
> > with the texts next to icons (which, in my opinion, is horribly
> > broken and as such should be removed),
> Aehm, how is text below icons 'more organized'?

Looks better, the text doesn't eat as much space. But actually the
worst problem with the view you showed was the tight layout. Try it
with the aligned layout and after that drop the text below and you'll
see how much it gets better. It won't show you any more icons
(probably less), but at least they are properly aligned (which makes a
huge difference).

> Even the current
> icon-view looks horrible disorganized due to its non-regular grid
> layout (grid size varies with the size of previews, which beside other
> problems makes proper incremantal loading of a directory basically
> impossible to implement).

Again, that's the "thight" layout you are talking about. And at least
my experiences tell me that it is not even supposed to keep alignment.

> > Seriously, it's not good to stuff things too tight, it makes the
> > browsing even slower.
> Well, no scrolling vs a few window full to scroll mean a whole lot
> faster browsing experience in my book.

Probably depends on the context too much to have an absolute best here
(like, what are you searching by (contents, name, location), how much
files are in the folder), but sure, if that's the only thing we look
at, it is faster.

> Yes, I browse my images in largeiconview too most of the time, however
> I have more then enough stuff that aren't images. And even for images
> smallicon view can be extremly helpfull from time to time.
> 
> The problem with nautilus is that if I want to see lots of files in a
> single window, my only option today is to Zoom out, that however
> renders the font completly unreadable pretty quickly.

Yes, yes, smallicon view would be great (I never said it wouldn't be,
did I?). Now we just need someone to code it ;)

-- 
Kalle Vahlman, zuh iki fi