Re: Proposal for File-Selection Dialog

["Ian Bicking" <bickiia earlham edu>]

> 3.) I assume that your first image would be a horizontal-scrolling pane,
> a la Windows.  If it's good enough for Windows, it's good enough for us,
> I guess.  But:
>
> http://www.iarchitect.com/file95.htm

I have to disagree with iarchitect on this one.  There's two issues which
are in conflict here.

(to summarize the criticism, people process lists vertically but the file
dialog scrolls horizontally)

If you alphabetize, you want to do that vertically -- anything else is
distinctly annoying (see DIR /W vs ls -- verticle sorting is much better).
You also want to keep things grouped together alphabetically.  So you want
to use as much of the screen/window real estate to display a certain range
of files.  If you scroll vertically and alphabetize vertically but allow
more than one column, you've defeated this (to see how this would work, just
do dir|less for some large directory).  You can have a range extend beyond
the view, then get picked up after a while as it goes to the next column.

There's a couple ways of dealing with this: make the list strictly
one-column.  Macs do this.  It's not unreasonable, but it makes navigating a
large directory difficult.  Really, there shouldn't be any large
directories, but that's not an option open to us.

You can sort horizontally.  This is annoying.  Or you can do like Windows
and scroll horizontally.  I think they made the right choice.

                                       -- Ian