Re: [Nautilus-list] Folder load behaviour

[Maciej Stachowiak <mjs noisehavoc org>]

On 11Oct2001 07:46AM (-0700), Darin Adler wrote:
> on 10/11/01 3:08 AM, Seth Nickell at snickell stanford edu wrote:
> 
> >> Is it possible to add an option to control how the folder is loaded?
> >> Now the icons are displayed as the folder are loading.
> >> I think this is annoying...
> >> Would be great if there could be an option in the preferences to change
> >> this so the entire folder is loaded before the icons are displayed.
> >> Is it hard, or could this even be in 1.0.5??
> > 
> > Hm, I would prefer this were not a preference, but perhaps the behavior
> > could be changed. The downside would be on large folders it would take a
> > long time for anything to display.
> > 
> > Darin, given that the directory read itself isn't really a performance
> > issue right now, couldn't we load things like icons respecting the
> > current sort order so that icons would fill the screen almost
> > immediately, but wouldn't dance around as new entries were added? (which
> > I think is why progressive loading could be seen as annoying)
> 
> Maciej tried to fix things so the icons wouldn't dance around. He ran into
> some trouble. You are welcome to give it a try too. I won't be able to get
> to this myself for a while.
 
The reason the icons dance around so much deosn't have much to do with
the sort order or filling the screen right away. The main problem is
that the canvas left-aligns the items according to the leftmost border
of the widest item in the left column, and this can vary during the
load depending on the lengths of the various filenames. It can and
will still vary at load time even if you fill the visible area first.

I tried to make the left-alignment consistent, but the canvas seems to
handle positioning in a somewhat confusing way (the items get placed
right, but the canvas thinks it's smarter than you and scrolls back
and forth).

Alex suggested putting a non-rendering canvas item at 0,0 as a
workaround. I haven't had a chance to try that yet.

 - Maciej