Re: Filesystem helper, draft 1

["Guillermo S. Romero / Familia Romero" <famrom infernal-iceberg com>]

snickell stanford edu (2001-05-12 at 1113.40 -0700):
> This seems like a potential problem. I don't know how often people
> wander outside their home folder. Because most of these directories do
> not (yet) contain user accessible information, its not clear how
> important it is to provide navigability to folders not inside their home
> folder. (note: "folder" is the adopted Nautilus convention, not
> "directory"). That said, this does seem like a desirable feature in the
> long run, particularly as we start adding Nautilus views for special
> directories like, say, /proc or /dev.

At home, you are the admin too, and some things are outside home dir
always, like servers or tmp/. /proc/ is a good example, when someone
asks what computer the user have, he will already see that /proc/ is
System information, so he will visit it and found files like CPU or
dirs like ide/, that when activated show the info nicely (aka parsed).

> So do you propose these act as real folder names, or just descriptions?
> e.g. can I navigate to /User Homes/Foo Bar's Home/Desktop ? Or is that
> merely descriptive text displayed in a column by the file manager?

Descriptions. In the filemanager, they will appear near the name, but
they do not have to stop there, a search function can provide the
description near the path, or show a tooltip.

> It remains to be seen if MacOS/X's "information hiding" will result in
> the same confusion as Windows' convention. That said, this seems like a
> reasonable approach, at least initially. Its certainely less invasive.0

Reason to inform instead of hide or virtualice.

> Don't become too involved with your analogies lest they bind thine hands
> and feet. I suspect we will move to ~/Desktop as the defacto desktop
> location for GNOME2, and will provide ~/ as an option to advanced users.

Desktop as real dir, I hope.

GSR