Re: Usability of the GTK+ 2 file open dialog

["David Necas (Yeti)" <yeti physics muni cz>]

On Tue, Mar 07, 2006 at 04:55:18PM +1100, Peter Eckersley wrote:
> 
> Is anyone else equally frustrated?

Absolutely.  Despite of the various attempts to make it suck
less with keyboard, it still sucks.

However, the widgets are quite different so to make them
switchable at toolkit level would be quite a lot of work, or
one would have to give up features of the new chooser that
actually can be useful, like the preview (see The GIMP).

Instead, I proposed to just scrap the feeble fakes of a file
name entry called location dialog and typeahead, and add
a permanent file name entry that behaves exactly like in
GtkFileSelection, including the awesome feature of using the
main file list as completion list when one presses Tab.
Except perhaps one change: Up and Down arrows could move
cursor in the file list but leave focus in the entry.

In my opinion, the result would be a dialog that both people
who use mouse (and do not care about file name entries) and
people who miss the power and elegance of Gtk1 dialog file
entry could use.  Who remains, are people who use
GtkFileChooser with keyboard and like it, but for me this is
an alien race so I cannot tell anything about them.

Yeti


--
That's enough.