Re: Usability of the GTK+ 2 file open dialog

[Michael L Torrie <torriem chem byu edu>]

On Tue, 2006-03-07 at 16:55 +1100, Peter Eckersley wrote:
> Is anyone else equally frustrated?

Yes.  From a new user usability standpoint, the GTK2 file selector is
probably pretty good.  For for anyone who needs more flexibility,
particularly from the keyboard, it sucks.

The most annoying things deal with opening files:
 * if you type the name of the file to open, you have to press enter
twice.
 * if there's no default mask, there's no way to manually specify a mask
on file open, so you have to scroll through potentially thousands of
files and manually drill-down to the file in question.  

I've grown a bit used to the GTK2 file selector, and also the
inspiration for it, the OS X file selector.  The other day, though, I
just discovered my biggest annoyance with the OS X file selector.  It's
a major show-stopper for me.  Fortunately GTK2 doesn't have the same
problem.  In OS X you simply cannot type a "/" in the file save dialog
box.  It just won't let you.  So you can't specify arbitrary paths.  You
have to drill-down to it, either using the favorites sidebar, or by
manually pointing and grunting.  Horrible.

As bad as the old GTK1 dialog was for new users and such, it was by far
the most powerful and flexible file chooser I have ever used.
Unfortunately that power was well hidden to the uninitiated who hated it
with a passion. I only discovered the cool gtk1 file chooser features
when I was browsing the source code to see if I could make a chooser
that didn't suck. :)   I think that the GTK2 chooser definitely should
have received a lot more attention before it went into the tree.  Now
we're stuck with its API. I think it can be made to work better, at
least to add a box to type in when doing file open.

Michael