'file palette'

[Chris Marston <deusx ls barrhead ab ca>]

I was considering creating an extremely minimalistic file manager to both
educate myself in the ways of the GTK and, possibly, as a contribution to
gnome. I know that a gnome filemanager is currently under production, but
as gnome 0.12 still refuses to compile I haven't been able to look at it. 

Basically, here's the idea:

A small, buttonless, menuless gtk window (or panel!) with naught but a
list widget in it, occupying the full frame. Files and directories are
double-clicked to open; however, holding down the mouse button and
dragging rightward over a directory opens a hierarchical submenu which
behaves according to the Law of Least Surprise. Left-dragging over any
file or directory would pop up a simple list of parent directories.
Dragging up or down would simply scroll the list. 

Choosing a file would cause the palette to look for opening methods,
possibly involving a translation mechanism a la Macintosh. In fact, IMO
the opening methods would best be spun off into a series of small generic
commands ('view' 'edit' 'send' etc) that would launch a viewer based on
the filetype and the environment (X or terminal). Why should gnome be just
for X, anyway? <g>

The palette would strive for minimalism and embeddability. As the user of
an older computer, I can say that clean, efficient and small applications
(the unix tradition!) that integrate first with the operating system and
*then* with any package or desktop to which they belong are vastly
superior (IMO) than, oh, say, xemacs. 


Does anyone care? More importantly, would gnome have any use for such a
device? File managers are nice, but they always seem far to bulky for my
needs. Perhaps others might feel the same way. Diversity Is Good. (tm)



 

CP/M
"The wisdom of youth and the energy of old age"