[Nautilus-list] expanding the list view -> tree view and usability suggestions

[Jonathan LaCour <gte079i prism gatech edu>]

Hackers,

In a recent discussion on #nautilus, a nice little idea occured to me.
We currently are making great strides in using Nautilus' "views" concept
to make viewing different kinds of files inside Nautilus a breeze.  So
far we have music views, OpenOffice views, etc.  Currently, the Nautilus
list view is functional, but could definitely use improvement.

First and foremost, I would like to see the standard MacOS-like ability
to expand folders in the same tree view.  This would greatly increase
the functionality of the list view for users.

Another interesting way that I came up with that we could increase the
list view's abilities would be to take the "view" concept one step
further.  Expanding Folders into a sub-list of files makes great sense,
but what about adding the ability to expand other files that have
similar properties to folders (files that 'contain' a set of
information)?  For example, consider the possibility of expanding down a
playlist in the list view, providing new headers with which to sub-sort,
while not losing context of the current folder.  Here is a *very* crude
ASCII art representation of what I am talking about, maybe an artist
will take a liking to this idea and could mock it up for me?:

+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
|     Name                  | Size     | Type        | Owner         |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
|     My Document.doc       | 12k      | Document    | panix         |
|                           |          |             |               |
| [-] Favorite Songs.list   | 4k       | Playlist    | panix         |
|       +------------------------------------------------------------|
|       | Song Title            | Song Artist          | Song Length |
|       +------------------------------------------------------------|
|       | Would?                | Alice In Chains      | 3:12:43     |
|       | Yellow Submarine      | The Beatles          | 2:47:36     |
|       | I Palindrome I        | They Might Be Giants | 3:01:04     |
|       | Enter Sandman         | Metallica            | 4:11:14     |
|       +------------------------------------------------------------|
|                           |          |             |               |
| [+] Nautilus              | 12M      | Folder      | panix         |
|                           |          |             |               |
|     Portrait.png          | 100k     | Image       | panix         |
|                           |          |             |               |
|     Portrait.png          | 100k     | Image       | panix         |
|                           |          |             |               |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------|

As I understand it from several people in #nautilus, the list view uses
a NautilusList which cannot handle such a task.  The GtkTreeView from
GTK 2.0 will be far more capable, and may be able to perform such an
operation.

I believe that this concept could probably be extended further into
expanding other types of files for extended information, like virtual
folders with editable search parameters, buddy-lists, configuration
files, etc.  This may very well be a horrible idea, but it is intended
to promote discussion on how to improve Nautilus.

I just wanted to submit this feature as a cool idea to increase the
usability of Nautilus, and see what people think about it.  I understand
the complexity of the problem is a bit high considering the current tree
limitations of GTK, and other obvious problems, but discussion of the
usefulness of something like this would be much appreciated.  I just
wanted to continue to spur on the effort to make Nautilus the most
usable graphical shell ever made.

Jonathan LaCour
Developer, VertiSoft
Panix on #gnome/#nautilus