Re: Recently Used Files Proposal

["Emmanuele Bassi" <ebassi gmail com>]

Hi Alex,

On 4/26/06, Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com> wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-04-25 at 08:12 +0200, Murray Cumming wrote:
> > On Thu, 2005-06-02 at 10:19 +0200, Emmanuele Bassi wrote:
> > > I've considered the option of making a menu, but I decided that we
> > > should avoid it for latency reasons; applications might just have a
> > > "Open recently used..." item which launches the dialog (many
> > > applications already use a submenu, there's no difference for the user's
> > > point of view), or we could add the ability to show recently used
> > > resources into the GtkFileChooser, near where we put the bookmarks.
> >
> > Aah, have you changed your mind about this? I haven't seen much
> > discussion of this change of a de-facto UI convention. Not that I
> > personally know what's better.
>
> It sounds like a change for the worse to me. Its very quick to browse
> the menu for the old file you were looking for. Opening a new dialog for
> it is very heavy and slow, and its less likely you'll even see the "Open
> recently used..." menu and understand what it does.
>
> I think much fewer people will use the recent files feature with a ui
> like this.
>

The email Murray was replying to was a draft sent a year ago.  It's
not valid anymore: the UI of the recently used documents has been
changed since then.

There are three widgets inside GTK, at the moment: a GtkMenu, useful
for setting a sub-menu for a GtkMenuItem or a GtkMenuToolButton; an
embeddable widget showing a list and a GtkDialog with that widget.

The treeview-like widget supports multiple filters, and is useful for
showing >15 items; it can be embedded inside a pane (think of gedit
side panes) or the dialog that embeds it automagically can be launched
from a "More..." menu item appended to the RecentChooserMenu.

There is also a plan for a GtkAction for showing recent files inside a
UI built using GtkUIManager; it has been pushed back because I'm
moving and I can't fully work on it until the 4th of May, when I get a
stable internet connection.

For an example of the widgetry, there are a couple of test programs
inside the libegg/recentchooser directory of libegg.

Ciao,
 Emmanuele.

--
It is against the grain of modern education to teach children to program.
What fun is there in making plans, acquiring discipline in organizing
thoughts, devoting attention to detail, and learning to be self-critical?
                -- Alan Perlis