file-chooser comments

[textshell t-online de]

hi,

following the discussion about this file chooser dialog box i think a
few things are worth noting:


1st: Multiple selection is _very_ usefull. But it must be an option that
can be enabled by an application without disturbing the user. I.e. it
should be as convientent to select files from an multiselect box as to
select them from an single select box! Ideally I think they are the same
dialogs, except maybe some clue that you can select more than one file.
I think such a clue isn't strictly necessary, because if i want to
select many files i just know that i want and it's just one click(with
ctrl, for example) to try. This done much more quickly than the manual
multiopen so it won't brother me.

I think multiselection shoudn't be in an different dialog, because the
prgrammers would be to lazy, or worse it would disturb the average user
because it's to inconvinent to use.

2nd: if automatic completion is to be used somewhere _please_ don't put
that scrab itto the X clipboard. It doesn't make sense and i hate all
these dialog that clear the X selection I made just to copy something to
_that_ dialog.

3rd: the listboxes used in the file-chooser dialog should be keyboard
enabled in the sense that you can just type the first letter(s) of a
filename to move the selection to it. This is very handy if one knows
his file starts with 'g', but doesn't like to search for this file in
his huge directory. Good examples for this behavior are the win95
explorer and (even if a bit ancient) the turbo  pascal 6.0 IDE.


4th: I think it is importent for a file chooser dialog to be
customizable by the application that uses that dialog. For example it is
very useful to be able to specify the dialog title and the text of the
open/save button. With support for this we could avoid having a "Select
file to open" dialog with an open button, when the user selected "attach
to eMail" in some menu, which so kind of ugly.
Further on I think that it is mandatory for a dialog that should be
widely accepted that the calling program can add some additional widgets
to the dialog. These could be an preview (in a manner suitable for
_this_ application), additional options (attach zipped checkbox) or
something we can't imagine without knowing that program.



and some random notes:

filename completion: on request CTRL and SPACE seems ok.

I don't like checkboxes in front of every filename.



I hope these notes will be of any help...

  martin