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

[John Sullivan <sullivan eazel com>]

Your points are all good ones, and I should point out that the Scripts
feature in Nautilus was never intended to be a substitute for building in
appropriate features in the appropriate places in the user interface. (I
know what I'm talking about here, since I came up with the idea for the
Scripts feature, and implemented it.) The Scripts feature was intended to be
a hook for user customizability, so that individual users could add fairly
lightweight functionality to Nautilus fairly easily.

If some feature is compelling and widely-used enough, it should be built
into Nautilus, not provided as a script; that way it can be put into the
appropriate place(s) in the user interface, appear only when relevant,
provide better feedback, etc. This is the essential dilemma of shipping
Nautilus with or without scripts. If a script is important enough to include
with every copy of Nautilus, then it would be better off built in somewhere.
But if (as is currently the case) Nautilus comes with no scripts, then the
scripting feature is a little harder to understand. That's why I created the
little explanatory message when you select "Show Scripts" (I might be
remembering the menu item name wrong -- I don't have a copy of Nautilus
handy.) I'm not sure this tradeoff is right -- it might be better overall to
include a few simple scripts as examples to get the user thinking about what
else they could do with the Scripts feature. But I think it would definitely
be a mistake to ship Nautilus with a large number of scripts.

Also, I am told that in the latest Nautilus (1.05) somebody added a feature
such that scripts can be organized arbitrarily in subfolders of the Scripts
folder, which appear as submenus. That should take care of your point (3)
below.

John

on 10/23/01 11:54 AM, S A Jarrett-Sprague at sjarrettsprague waitrose com
wrote:

> 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.
> 
> 
> 
> 
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