Re: file chooser and recently used dirs

["Yevgen Muntyan" <muntyan tamu edu>]

On Thu, October 4, 2007 12:37 pm, Emmanuele Bassi wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-10-04 at 19:23 +0200, Pere Pujal i Carabantes wrote:
>> Hi all!
>>
>> This message comes after a discussion on the gimp-user mail list, but I
>> think it can be usefull for other apps as well.
>>
>> One of the results of the discussion is that will be helpfull if a list
>> of the mostly recent used directories can be presented in the file
>> chooser save dialog.

Why Save? Don't you want to be able to open a file from some directory
you used today? It's the same thing for Open and Save - you want to have
list of recent directories easily accessible, regardless if you're saving or
opening a file.

>>
>> There is yet "Recently Used" (files), but for saving is better to have
>> "Recently used dirs" for an easy browsing to the destination directory.
>
> if an application registers a directory inside the recently used
> resources list, it will also appear inside the Recently Used shortcut of
> the file chooser.

It'd be bad. "Recent places" is a totally different thing from "Recent
files". You don't want to see all the folders with all the files you opened,
you want them separate in some way.

Recent files list may be abused, you can put folders in there (totally
ridiculous, by the way), but it's just that - abusing recent files list.
Inconvenient and ugly.

Take a look at KDE's dialog (sorry for mentioning the evil guys which get
stuff wrong). They don't have list of recent files (it is accessible from
applications menus, so they probably didn't feel needed to duplicate it just
because it's possible), but they do have a list of directories.
And that list is pretty much invisible, it's the dropdown at the top right
corner (where you can also just enter the location), so it doesn't eat any
extra space.

And then, applications shouldn't do the file manager job. They know what
files they open, they shouldn't care about the folders. They have to of
course, since filechooser won't do it, but it sucks. The more stuff to do
which has nothing to do with the actual application functionality, the more
it sucks.

> there's a bug open for making the file chooser save the current
> directory when in SAVE and SELECT_FOLDER mode[1], but it's missing an
> implementation.

Hopefully it won't break applications which already take care of that,
like the sizing stuff did.

Regards,
Yevgen