Re: [gtk-list] Re: file selector

[Brian Brunswick <bdb eidos co uk>]

In article <fd43c3f248%marble@executor.karoo.co.uk> you write:
>In message <Pine.HPP.3.96n.990414170547.12475B-100000@mlucom6.urz.uni-halle.de>
>          Andreas Tille <tille@physik.uni-halle.de> wrote:
>
>> > * single-click to switch dirs in dir-list
>> >     - heck, I prefer it anyway
>> Me, too.  If I could write down a dram here, I'd like to navigate in
>> the way Midnight Commander does.  Switch the windows with <Tab> and
>
>Why not just provide a space where you could drag and drop a file from
>a file manager? That way file selection only needs to be done in one
>place (the file manager).
>
>Saving could also be done by providing an icon which could be dragged
>and dropped to the filer.
>
>(This works very well in the RISC OS operating system, but would likely
>be a shock to Windows users. RISC OS has no load dialog - you just drop
>from the filer, and the save dialog is a tiny filer window with the one
>file icon and an 'OK' button to save to the last place you saved to.
>Some apps also provide a 'Kill' icon, and the save dialog is
>automatically presented if you close an unsaved document.)
>
>Just a thought:)
>~A.
>

Aha somebody else is a refugee from RISC OS! We've been translating
our Optima application across to gtk, and wanted to preserve the RISCOS
style dragging to avoid disturbing our users.

I argued for it a bit over in gtk-app-devel a few weeks ago. What
people don't really seem to realise is that the standard file
dialogues are already ***over complicated*** - its like building an
/entire/ file manager into every application. Instead, gtk should just
have hooks that can link in with whatever file manager the USER
actually wants, along with a default gtk file manager that implements
these load/save dialogues in whatever way is preferred. If we have to
have all this stuff in the library anyway, lets at least make it
capabale of copy/rename etc as well as load/save.

For the moment, in Optima everything is done by just ignoring the
standard file dialogues, and doing our own, (which we do under RISCOS
anyway to add options to the save) but it would be nice to have other
gtk applications be able to fit in with a RISCOS style file manager,
or indeed any other variant sort of file manager.

At some stage I should package up a proper patch of the changes we
needed to the gtk drag and drop code to do this. (Supporting the X
standard for arguments passed in to conversion requests) There also
needs to be an agreement about a standard "SAVETOFILE" or some such
conversion type (which takes the filename as an argument). This means
things can work using just the standard drag and drop protocols.

We have patches to xtree to support this, but are currently lacking
anything more like the riscos filer.