[Nautilus-list] Scripts, their usability and the Gnome terminal script

[S A Jarrett-Sprague <sjarrettsprague waitrose com>]

Hi
I posted some time ago to say I thought konqueror seemed to be more 
user-friendly and useful. The reply was that scripts were the answer. 
Having found out what people were talking about (scripts seem to be a 
well kept secret). I have some observations on their utility.

1. Scripts seem to make sense if their action is on a highlighted file 
or folder e.g. extracting tar.gz or compress director to tar.gz. It does 
not feel 'right' that one has to click on a file to call up script->open 
terminal here.  I would expect that right clicking on the background of 
the directory itself should call up the gnome terminal. Why would a 
common mortal think that selecting a file or folder has anything to do 
with calling up a gnome terminal? I am guessing it was never intended 
that scripts were for anything other than actions on files or 
directories, and the gnome terminal script is making the best of a bad 
deal. I still think Konqueror's design is clearer in this regard, and it 
will be regretable if the pragmatic gnome terminal script solution stays 
in Gnome 2.0 as suggested elsewhere.

2. To get to some of the common scripts, e.g. extract, compress & gnome 
terminal, one is having to get to them to via script->submenu. Unless 
you are told where they are I doubt if the average user would ever find 
them. Again the common scripts (e.g. system default scripts) should I 
think be on the main menu given on right-clicking. The average user is 
likely to right click on a folder/file and find something more 
meaningful than 'scripts'. The scripts menu item I guess was meant for 
user-defined scripts not for general system wide actions.

3. I seem to have alot of scripts that I got from a web site. This means 
that the scripts submenu is huge. It would be kind of nice if  scripts 
could be organised in folders in the script directory and that this 
could be reflected in the script menu.


4. Admittedly I have Ximian Gnome so this may be the problem. I would 
have thought that each user should be given a set of scripts in the 
script directory by default. It would seem that a new user is expected 
to aquire scripts after installing Gnome. However, unless you know about 
scripts how are you going to get all that extra Nautilus functionaliy?

Scripts are a neat idea for adding functionality to Nautiulus. However, 
I don't think they are an excuse for leaving out some of the common 
functionality that currently is available by default in Konqueror.

Reliance on scripts makes Nautilus look a bit do-it-yourself/hackerish 
where as Konqueror appears to have all the functionality you need built 
in/and is ready for use aka Mac finder.

Ending on a postive note I think Nautilus has the potential to make 
gnome as good as Mac OS X.