Re: Suggestion for a GTK+ widget: Filebox.

[thristian atdot org]

On Sat, Aug 19, 2000 at 09:29:36AM -0400, Ken Fox wrote:
> thristian@atdot.org wrote:
> > A Filebox is like a regular single-line text-entry widget ...
> 
> Great idea. I'd call this a FilenameField because box to me
> implies composite widget.

In fact, Glade tells me GNOME already has a File Entry Widget of some
sort, but I don't know if it has autocompletion.

> > The widget should have whatever auto-completion style we choose, and
> > should complete all paths as though $HOME is the current working
> > directory.
> 
> Why $HOME? If I want that I'll just type "~/" first. 

Law of Least Surprise. Since there's no display of files, you can't
see where you are in the filesystem and have no way of knowing what
your options are. You could be starting *anywhere*. But I would expect
it to start from $HOME - because, after all, that is conceptually my
home directory, where I start from.

> If $HOME is the default then the widget wouldn't be any good for
> doing chdir commands.

chdir commands? I was thinking like for the gnome-find program, where
you specify an initial directory, or maybe for the "choose a
background image" widget in gnome-terminal. You don't really want to
have any state in the widget.. well, I don't.

> BTW, it would be really nice if both this widget and the file dialog
> understood csh ~ syntax and $ environment variables. That would
> really save a lot of typing (and make documentation easier to write).

I think the file-dialog already knows ~ for $HOME. I don't know if it
knows ~userid/, and I'm pretty sure it doesn't do environment
variables. Ever seen mutt's .rc format? It takes back-ticks and
environment variables and all sorts of shell weirdness. :)

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