Re: Usability of the GTK+ 2 file open dialog

[Sven Neumann <sven gimp org>]

Hi,

Peter Eckersley <pde cs mu oz au> writes:

>> No, you haven't. Just type the name of the file to open (or rather
>> only the first letters of it). Then press Enter once. Do _not_ press
>> Ctrl-L before you do this, just use typeahead as in any other list
>> view.
>
> This fragment of a solution is a good example of my problems with
> the GTK2 chooser.  It works fine, but *only* if the file path you
> want to type starts with / .  Typing relative paths, or paths that
> start with ~, leads to random crazyness.

Why is typeahead random crazyness? All GTK+ list views do this (well,
at least if the application programmer cared to specify a search
column). So this is exactly what the GTK+ user expects because it is
consistent with the rest of the application. Opening a dialog box with
a text entry is definitely not what the user would expect to happen
and I am all for getting rid of this dialog. If we need a text entry
(and I agree that it sometimes makes sense to have one), then it
should replace the path-bar just like it is done in Nautilus. Perhaps
I will try to cook up a patch for that as soon as Federico has
committed the pending changes to the file-chooser.



Sven