Re: Open file dialog improvements

[Ghislain MARY <gmary lunacymaze org>]

Hi,

Le jeudi 13 septembre 2007 �1:49 +0300, alecs1 a �it :
> 	This e-mail may not be very pleasant, but since I am affected very much by 
> some Gtk decissions I have to complain and hope for a nice reply and 
> solution.

I think all remarks are always good to be heard, that's the way to
improve oneself or something :-)

> 	Please include the following features in the Gtk open file dialog:
> -an addres bar
> -an option to view the thumbnails
> -some basic file editing methods (mainly delete and rename).
> 
> 1.An address bar is very useful when you have the address (or a part of it) of 
> a deep directory/file. It also helps you have more exact idea of where you 
> are than the bread crumb method.

On recent gtk versions you have a button to show the address bar but
with older versions (as the one you seem to use) you should be able to
make it magically appear by pressing Ctrl + L.

> 2.An option to view the thumbnails helps very much when selecting a picture 
> with programs like Gimp and gaim; when selecting a font with VLC.

Recent versions of Gimp have a preview pane on the side. I don't know
about gaim and VLC but I think you should tell it to the maintainers of
these particular applications to make it change if that is not already
the case.

> 3.The rename and edit functionalities are also very useful, for example when 
> making more versions of a file (a drawing for example), and when you save the 
> one you feel is the best you have the oportunity to delete the other ones. 
> Another thing is when creating more files with the same pattern and you 
> decide for a standard name and are able to rename all the others to respect 
> the name convention.

I remember having something about this one with great arguments from the
2 parties, GNOME having made the choice to not put a whole file manager
in the open file dialog.
This is not particularly user friendly, renaming or deleting a file not
being the task the user should be wanting to do at this moment.
Further more, having gtk do this would create a dependency from gtk on
nautilus. This is not correct some gtk applications needing to be ported
on operating systems not using nautilus as a file manager.
There are certainly of other good reasons for this behaviour.

> The lacking of feature number 1 is the reason I switched from Gimp to Krita 
> for my extremely simple drawings. Because of this I started hating Gtk/Gnome: 
> if the toolkit to have such bad ideas never existed the programs had to use 
> some user friendly solutions :).
> 
> Here is a link to a screenshot I took and posted on a forum. 
> http://www.linux360.ro/forum/image-asp1940.html
> It depicts the hastle of choosing a picture for a buddy icon with Gaim, 
> choosing a font with VLC and the standard dialog from Kate, which I could 
> even convince to sort and show thumbnails (though it is a text editor). For 
> the people who understand Romanian, the language will seem very impolite, 
> because it expresses my frustrations of trying to use some programs I really 
> like, and having to drop them because of the dialogs.
> 
> Thank you very much.
> Alex.

Ghislain