Re: [Nautilus-list] select all, unselect all and invert selection patch

[Darin Adler <darin bentspoon com>]

On Thursday, June 14, 2001, at 01:17  PM, Benedikt Roth wrote:

> the attached patch improves the behaviour of the 'Select All' menu item
> and adds two new menu items to the 'Edit' menu: 'Unselect All'
> and 'Invert Selection'.

I personally think that Unselect All is not a very good addition. And I 
think that Invert Selection is a pretty strange feature. I guess it can be 
useful, and it does fit into the family with commands like "Select by file 
glob" or "Select by regular expression", but it seems hard to understand. 
It sounds to me like something that would turn my images upside down, not 
something that would select everything in the window that's not currently 
selected.

I'm not sure if desensitizing Select All when everything is already 
selected is necessarily an improvement. It could just be confusing to see 
the menu item insensitive in this case. I agree that it's cool to do this 
extra refinement, but I think it's not really an improvement.

In general, I think that desensitized items can be confusing since there's 
no way to find out why they're not available. That's why on the Macintosh,
 for example, we made the Erase Disk item sensitive even when you select 
the boot disk, and then we give an error message. Just making it 
insensitive is too subtle in that case. This is not an important case like 
that one, but I wanted to give the example to point out the 
non-documenting nature of desensitized things.

So I think I'd prefer not to take this change.

But I am not a tyrant. If there's a different consensus here on the list, 
I'd be happy to reconsider.

    -- Darin