[Nautilus-list] Advanced feature request (learning tasks by example)

[Daniel Wang <danwang CS Princeton EDU>]

I was musing about why, I hate file GUI's soo much and boiled it down to the
fact that I can't script the darn things to do silly repetitive tasks.

Like for instance move the mp3 files and only the mp3 files from one folder
to another. Or rename uniformly rename a group of files based on some pattern.
Or invoke the same program on the the same set of files. This is why, I'll
never give up my command shell... However, there are times when writing the
right one liner is just as much a pain as doing it by hand.  

What I'd like to see in Nautilus, is a feature includes some relatively
simple AI. In particular, added a button called "learn a task by
example" to nautilus. Once the button is pressed nautilus goes into learning
mode. The use than does some set of tasks, such as moving a few files and
then hits another button "done with example", which tells nautilus that it
should be able to figure out what to do next. 

Between these two button, presses nautilus is logging all the user actions
to some file, once it's done. We run the file through some fancy yet to be
written AI pattern recognition engine, which spits out a program in a
command language, which the user can use to automate a task. 

The script generated by the AI engine doesn't have to be perfect, as long as
it gets most of the simple cases. Advanced users can edit the script to get
exactly what they want. Novice users could step though the script step by
step to see what it does. If it does the wrong thing they, can try to give
the AI more info by doing a bigger example.

I'm not an AI expert, but it seems that for lots of daily things, you don't
really need that much smarts.. and it's not to hard to architect things so
the engine is completely separate from nautilus. There just needs to be some
way to log users events.

Anyway, can I convince anyone to bite this one off and build for me the
perfect file manager GUI?