Re: Proposal for File-Selection Dialog

[sml13 cornell edu]

Brave man, Ian.  Defending the Windows way of doing things on the Gnome 
list.  You have my respect...and agreement too, I guess :-)  Although I'm 
not terribly passionate about such things.  I think just about any of 
those screen mockups that that fellow has done are a vast improvement on 
the butt-ugly (and minimally-functional) thingy that is in GTK+ right 
now.  Keep pickin' those cherries, boys.

shane

"The Linux community is very willing to copy features from other OS's if 
it will serve their needs. Consequently, there is the very real long
term threat that as MS expends the development dollars to create a bevy of new features in NT, Linux will simply cherry pick the best features an incorporate 
them into their codebase."

	-- Vinod Vinod Valloppillil (VinodV@microsoft.com, vinod@vinod.com, http://www.vinod.com), Sr. Microsoft Engineer, "Halloween II" 
(http://www.opensource.org/halloween2.html)
  

On Mon, 21 Dec 1998, Ian Bicking wrote:

> > 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
>