Re: GTK+-2.4.0 released

[Paul Pogonyshev <pogonyshev gmx net>]

> > lacks Tab-completion.
>
> Did you try? (One possibility is that if you are on a slow machine /
> slow file system, it might be possible to type faster than it figure out
> completions; other than that, I'd think it would be fairly hard
> to miss the typeahead completion action. Tab will accept the current
> completion)

No, I didn't.  I don't like pressing C-f, assuming it's what you meant.
I seriously don't understand why C-f is so badly needed to search in
GtkTreeView's.  I know the main reason is to make internationalized
(with non-latinic characters) widgets more accessible, but why not
allow both explicit and implicit (without C-f) searches?

My native language is Russian, but I prefer all software to be in
English.  I understand this is not a very common case, but for me and
everybody else who [almost] doesn't use non-English software, C-f is
very inconvenient.

> > So, by all means it's fully operable from keyboard, but with two times the
> > number of keypresses I needed in GtkFileSelection.  I vote the latter.
> > It was a simple, Emacs-style file chooser.  Well, it was ugly, but it
> > was (and is) _convenient_ to use.
>
> Two times the number of keypresses? how many one-letter files did you
> open? :-)

Well, I basically open files like this:

        ~/ [if needed] ab TAB cd TAB e TAB -- done

Of course it depends on exact filenames and directory contents, but
typically one--two leters are enough.

For me, nothing (except some "mind reader") can replace a simple text
entry, even if C-f is not required and it jumps around in list widget.
I find Emacs-style file chooser very convenient.  One of the largest
advantages is that you _immediately_ see the complete path to file
in one place: you don't have to lookup directories there, filename
here etc.  And the most important is that you don't have to do any
unneeded keypresses like C-f or whatever.

Paul


P.S.  I use KDE (GNOME is installed though).  That might influence
      something, don't know.  I like GTK+ very much if only because
      it is way cleaner than Qt, but I don't like GNOME's policy to
      be oversimplistic (almost no settings etc.).  It might be a
      win for newbies, but not for me.