[HIG] HIG comments on files and consistency

[Florent de Dinechin <Florent de Dinechin ens-lyon fr>]

Hello,

I once used a system called RISC OS which was much more consistent than 
Gnome in its user interface to file management. It seems that this 
question is absent from your draft, and as I miss the comfort it gave, 
here it is. I am not sure you are the right address to send it, but I 
am sure you will be able to forward it.

Basically, there is one big inconsistency in the current Gnome desktop:
 you may _load_ a file by drag-and-drop (and it is sometimes very 
useful), but you never (or very rarely) _save_ a file by drag and drop.

Let me explain. In RISC OS, the standard save dialog which was used by 
all applications, showed

1/ a filename, (with possibly a path, with possibly a file hierarchy 
navigation utility as we have in Gnome), and

2/ an icon of the file to save, which could be dragged to any filer 
(gmc/nautilus) window. You could also drag this icon to any window  
able to receive this type of file.

You see that it is the symmetrical of drag-and-drop loading of a file 
from a gmc/whatever window. It makes exchanging files between 
applications completely consistent. And it is an addition to the 
current save dialogs, not a replacement, so it doesn't prevent using 
the current way of saving through file navigation.


You probably don't imagine how convenient such a feature is in everyday 
computing. I give some longuish examples below. I hope that you may 
feel that it is the kind of consistency that does make life easy.

	Florent

PS1 I am aware that there is an attempt to create a RISCOS-like layer 
on top of Linux, it is called ROX. However it is very slowly 
developping in comparison to Gnome.

PS2: some examples of tasks where I definitely miss this drad-and-drop 
save feature.

You are editing images from your camera (cropping etc), and then the 
same time sorting them into several directories, say your web space 
(reduced version) and your archive (full version). You will keep 
navigating your file hierarchy in the save box, which at most remembers 
the last directory. If you don't like navigating, you may do all the 
archive versions, then copy the wole (drag-and-drop) to the web space, 
then do all the reductions there. You notice that each picture is 
loaded twice. If I have drag-and-drop save, I just keep two gmcs open, 
I may crop, save to an open gmc, resize, save to the second gmc, 
without leaving eeyes.

Saving a picture from the web, I may want to save it to disk, to eeyes 
or to the gimp, to a mail as attachement, etc. Currently I have to save 
it to some /tmp (again navigation), and then get it from there (by 
drag-and-drop) to its target. If I had the icon in the save box of the 
browser I would simply drag it from there to the target window or panel 
application. Same for saving anything from the web, viewing the 
sources, etc.

I currently use SkipStone as a browser (waiting for Galeon to enter 
Debian testing). It shows its attachments as nice icons which you can't 
drag anywhere (you can save them the usual way). It is very 
frustrating. I would like, each time I get a .com attachment sent by a 
virus, to drag-and-drop it to the emacs that lies on my panel to look 
at it, without having to go through saving to disk, then loading from 
disk, then cleaning disk (or leaving it cluttered).