Re: [Nautilus-list] Integration of gmc and nautilus desktop directories.

[Tuomas Kuosmanen <tigert ximian com>]

On 14 Apr 2001 07:41:50 -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> My guess is that tigert is right, for average users, making ~ the
> desktop would be quite nice; they'd be able to find everything.
> But it might annoy hackers a bit. And we've already discovered that
> our current market is hackers and annoying them is sort of perilous.

Is it? I think we also want to make GNOME accessible for the "never used
a computer before" -people. One of the arguments I have heard has been
"GNOME enables my grandmother to use a free operating system".  Of
course hackers *are* a major user group for us expecially at this point.
But  there is one serious problem with giving a graphical file manager
to hackers. They are not used to graphical file managers. So they dont
see any problem in having a separate (hidden) dir for the desktop.
Neither am I used to one, but I found nautilus useful now that I have
these digital photos to sort and manage (the thumbnails :). I also found
it cool to be able to drag a picture from the desktop to my Evolution
mail message as an attachment. And it is much easier to just quickly
save to the desktop from the Gimp, drag it to the mail and hit Send. If
I only wouldnt need to navigate to a strange dir with Gimp first. So I
could symlink "~/Pics" to "~/.nautilus/desktop/Pics" but I really think
_we_ are the ones who understand symlinks - we can symlink our stuff
wherever we want. I just wouldnt want to teach those things to new users
whenever it is not necessary.

And yes, the next thing I'd do after sending the mail is to drag the
file to the trashcan so it wouldnt clutter my homedir. Guess how many
"foo-N.png" files I had in my $HOME before? I really think it reduces
clutter when you see those temporary files on the desktop. "Hm. Now what
is this file? Oh *that* pic I needed to send to Ettore last week. ->
*delete*". They just piled up there before since they never bothered me.
Not until my homedir was 4GB and the partition filled up. 

> Maybe a better approach would be to let you set which directory is the
> desktop in some dialog, then we could experiment and maybe end up with
> ~ as default.

Maybe we should have an option for this in the Expert user level. Have
the default be $HOME, but give an option to use ~/Desktop or
~/.gnome-desktop or whatever if an experienced user wants to.

I just think we hackers can do the extra mouseclick to make it work like
we want, but I dont really think we should push our usage habits to the
non-l33t-hax0rz. Lets have it as an option for *us* to change it if we
want, and lets make it easy for the new users instead.

> public_html is a hard one. Nautilus and Evolution should be
> dot-directories, they annoy me in command line mode too. Or would if I
> didn't have 500 disorganized things in ~ anyway. ;-) Since they are
> only program-edited I don't get why I have to see them.

This goes offtopic, but one could do nifty things with some scripts that
were bound to public_html's context menu. "Publish for web" would be an
interesting idea to think about. I know not everyone keeps their web
pages in ~/public_html, but it is used pretty widely in universities
etc. Sticking some kind of druid-like configuration helper to get your
pages synced to the web would be pretty neat ("This folder can be used
to publish your web page. Do you have a local web server or do you need
to rsync, scp, ftp or some other method to get stuff up on the web? Now
fill in this form and we get your page published!") And yes, I know one
can use a ftp-client to do this as well. As well as one can use bash as
the filemanager  :)

This is not really Nautilus's job but there could be an external app
that hooks to the "public_html" dir, maybe then adds a custom icon to it
(a folder with a web emblem or something) and adds a context menu (which
is not possible currently I think) But this is *really* offtopic for
this thread so just ignore these last two paragraphs :)

Tuomas


________________________________________________________________________
 
Tuomas Kuosmanen - Art Director -
Ximian - tigert ximian com -
www.ximian.com


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