[gnome-love] Re: [Nautilus-list] Re: GNOME user environment brainstorming

[John Sullivan <sullivan spies com>]

on 5/24/01 8:31 PM, Havoc Pennington at hp redhat com wrote:

> John Kodis <kodis jagunet com> writes:
> > On Thu, May 24, 2001 at 03:48:04PM -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> >
> > > There's some possible confusion about shortcut buttons on panel vs. on
> > > desktop, especially since panel icons require single-click, desktop
> > > double-click.
> >
> > It's already possible to configure Nautilus to activate desktop icons
> > on a single click.  I much prefer this because of its simplicity and
> > because of its consistancy with panel icons, menu items, hyperlinks,
> > and most everything else.
> >
> > Requiring a double click might be reasonable if there were some common
> > action bound to a single click.  Lacking that, however, this default
> > seems poorly choosen.
>
> The rationale for double is presumably that you can select
> icons. e.g. I can select an icon, then shift-select others and perform
> some operation on them. Or I can select then hit the shortcut for
> Rename. etc.
>
> Havoc

Exactly, single-click does have a common action -- selection. It's probably
the case that activating an icon is the most common action by far, but
without selection you can't do any of the other icon-based tasks (rename,
show properties, move to trash, cut/copy, etc.).

You can also select icons with rubberband-selection (drag a box around
them), but this is much less discoverable.

You can also do (at least most of) these icon-based tasks with the
right-click menu, but not everybody knows about the right-click menu, as
there is no visual cue that it exists.

Nautilus originally had single-click to activate as the default. Then we did
user testing with some non-GNOME users, and asked them to rename a file. It
was a disaster, mostly due to the single-click activation. So we changed the
default to double-click to activate.

John