Re: My Critics about nautilus

[Ingo Ruhnke <grumbel gmx de>]

Kalle Vahlman <kalle vahlman gmail com> writes:

> 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.

If you have files that are named that way and which thumbnail provides
no hint about their content then you better change to the (currently
non existant) smallicon view, which gives you full names and a much
better overview. Largeicon view is really not that useable in such
situations.

> The space is to ensure that the largest possible previevew icon
> doesn't screw the alignment.

No, the space is just there to be just plain white, always. Even the
huged previewicon leaves still plenty of free space available to the
next.

> 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

Thats IMHO by far the best solution, since it avoids ugly irregular
gridding and could still keep everything close together, if you want
larger pictures you can always just zoom in, zoom feature is after all
quite usefull for exactly that job..
 
>>> 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.

I don't want to replace the large icon mode, I just want to have an
additional smallicon mode. As is stand now, yes, text beside icons as
nautilus can do it today looks extremly ugly, like this screenshot
shows:

http://pingus.seul.org/~grumbel/tmp/kdesucks/nautilus-fileview.png

a real icon view however doesn't (well, the kde one is still 'ugly'
due to underlining and horizontal scrolling):

http://pingus.seul.org/~grumbel/tmp/kdesucks/konqvsrox.png

> 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.

No, even the non-thight layout of nautilus is irregular, since the
columns and rows don't have equal size, which is IMHO rather ugly when
one has a bunch of normal files with a little icon and an image
inbetween with a huge preview.

> 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, after all it depends on what one is doing, for some jobs large
icons are great (viewing image thumbnails), seeing all the details,
detail view is great, for browsing large amounts of files, however
none of them is really much useable, smallicon view however would.

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

Ok, I think we agree after all (well, more or less ;), better stop
discussion and get productive :)

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