[Nautilus-list] Usability - death of options 2

[=?koi8-r?q?=F7=D1=DE=C5=D3=CC=C1=D7_?==?koi8-r?q?=E4=C9=CB=CF=CE=CF=D7?= <sdiconov mail ru>]

> Hundreds of millions of users get by on Windows and Mac without the
> preference for what happens on inserting removable media. So the
> burden of proof is on you to explain why it is required for a "usable
> filemanager" - why is Linux special? 
It is special because _supermount_ is not included in the modern 2.4
kernels and users have to mount all media manually. Existing tools,
including Nautilus'es implementation ("Disks" menu), are by
no means equivalent to the offtopic's behaviour. Moreover, there _is_
preference for what happens when one inserts a disk in Windows. It is
called "disable autorun" :^).      


> rationale. A philosophical rant on how you want a bunch of preferences
> is not going to work. ;-)
OK. Here is a list of what makes Nautilus a bad (unusable) filemanager.

1. It is painfully slow. Some progress is obvious, but Nau should be as
quick as Windows95 Explorer to compete with Explorer and make Gnome a
viable alternative...

2. It lacks many important features (or those features are poorly
implemented):
  2.1 File search is totally wrecked. There is a button, but it only    
      shows error messages without medusa, which seems to be a 
      deprecated and basicly wrong solution, becouse it searches  
      some DB instead of real FS. (Correct me if I am wrong.) 
  2.2 Mount/eject problem with possible hardware damaging effects.
      Do you remember that letter about tray damages of CD-ROMS in a
      locked security case? The Desktop is unmanageable becouse of 
      unwanted media icons appering and disappearing on their own.
      The "Disks" menu should also be configurable (Hiding and 
      renaming of some entries is important. Would be nice to have 
      them as right-click dropdowns) 
      * Why not make a Mount/Unmount menu for the directories listed 
        in fstab? Why not automount respective media on entering those 
        directories and show an error when there is no media in drive?
      * Why should both CDROM, DVD and CDRW have the same icons? 
      * Why not include Win/Mac icons for the given disk support?    
      * I want to have two modes "Mac like" and "Win like" (changing   
        icons in "My Linux") for indicating the state of mountable
        devices.
  2.3 File associations for archive files must work! It is not possible
      to associate .sxw with OpenOffice. Setting the default action for
      an archive to "open with application", "file-roller" results in a
      error message "No default viewer"... Removing all respective 
      entries in the MIME capplet and creating new ones from scratch 
      did not work either.    
  2.4 It is not convenient to do common file operations which involve 2
      different directories (COPY, MOVE). The whole problem is that any 
      single Nautilus window shows only 1 location at a time, opening 2 
      windows clutters the desktop and takes ages, dragging from a 
      sidebar is unfamiliar and unconvenient becouse the sidebar's tree 
      (with files) is too large to view. The solution is to display 2 
      locations in 1 window simultaneously. This is done nicely in 
      console mc. However, horisontal split may be better for a GUI 
      filemenager using icons instead of rows of text.   
  2.7 Filter, select by mask, compress/extract (to any type of archive)
      UUEencode/decode, singing "Happy birthday to you!" once a year...
  2.6 FAM doesnt't work for me, even though it is installed. I used rpms
      for my distro. (I do not know if this is a general problem or
      just my faulty setup.)   

3. Viewers and sidebar applets look nice, but: 
  3.1 Notes tab has no i18n whatsoever. Entered text is not saved if it 
      is not pure ASCII (stupid).
  3.2 Text viewer is largely unusable because it fails to display text 
      correctly. It MUST be able to 
        a) choose codepage of the viewed text both explicitly via a menu
           and automatically. All routines for Russian, Chinese and 
           Japanese have already been written and are used in different
           other projects. I can even send you source for Russian.(it is
           obscure for those who do not speak any language except
           English). 
        b) hide DOS linebreaks (which appear as junk)
        c) Set font for the viewed text. (e.g. Monospaced for some 
           encodings and bigger/nicer font for reading 40.000 
           of E-books I have).      
  3.3 Help viewer is nothing without full-blown man _search_ (enter    
      question and get the answer instantly) and info browser.
  BUGS
  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
  WISHES 
  3.4 Archive browsing for .RAR .HA .ZIP .RPM .DEB and other formats 
      (like it was done in GMC or newer M$ Explorer) is a must! 
      * (remember about codepages for storing filenames and "/" vs "\" 
        differences in legacy .zip and .rar files).
  3.5 SAMBA browsing inside nautilus is a good addition. KDE Konqueror
      already has it.
      * (remember that codepages for storing filenames on remote
         computers may differ from Linux default)
      * It would be VERY convenient to have the "share this folder as"
        tab in the properties. Most users are accustomed to this. 
  
4. UI design is highly illogical right now.
  4.1 File listing mode and Zoom controls should clearly be moved to 
      the main toolbar. The location bar turned on just to have access 
      to those two buttons clutters up the window space and spoils the 
      view.
  4.2 Why does Web Search button show up in the main toolbar when the 
      window displays the contents of a local directory?
  4.3 When a user selects 1000 icons and clicks "Properties" menu he,
      probably, wants to see the total amount of disk space used by 
      the selected objects and set uniform permissions instead of seeing
      1000 identical dialogs suddenly littering the desktop and spend an
      hour closing them one by one %| .
  4.6 F2 to rename files works only in "view as icons" mode. There 
      might be other variants of the "view as list" mode.
  4.5 It might be a good idea to change Nautilus theme and AA mode from 
      a separate Control-center capplet rather then from a filemanager
      window. It seems logical to have all theme switching in one place,
      especially if Nautilus is considered to be an integral part of the
      desktop.

5. Why is that UGLY desktop flicker happens when Nautilus starts? The 
   desktop was much nicer drawn in GMC (except for ugly and 
   unchangeable GMC fonts). Moreover, The current way of drawing it 
   breaks compatibility :(  with existing programs.    

There is nothing original here. All of this has already been mentioned
in this very mailing list before. Many of the issues were reported
several times, which proves that people do have troubles. All of this
needs to be fixed somehow to make Nautilus the real thing. 

Is it insane?
Should I file all of this as bugs?  

P.S. I take part in the mailing list of ALTLinux distribution
www.altlinux.ru which has a lot of subscribers (it often overfills my
mail account). Some of them are beginners, some are Linux professionals.
It looks like the consolidated opinion is that Nautilus is a NIGHTMARE,
but a promising one. I saw many mails cursing you for the current
(1.0.6) mount/eject behaviour, for instance. This indicates that the
present state of things, the "smart defaults" are totally wrong. BTW,
the authors of these mails do not speak English.

P.P.S. I actually feel guilty when writing here since my programming
skills are extremely limited. I would gladly contribute to the project
by translating the manual or drawing themes for a _usable_ Nautilus
however.


//A filemanager is a piece of software made for managing files//
//A usable filemanager is a filemanager which is easy, powerfull 
and fun to use//