Revisiting the Icon View UI

[<bordoley msu edu>]

I've been thinking a lot about this. One of my main complaints about nautilus 
is that in manual layout you can only arrange icons by name (clean up by 
name). This was also presented in the UI review as a problem for desktop 
icons since currently user can only arrange icons by name (clean up by name) 
since the desktop icons are always in manual layout.

Some ideas:

1. Always use manual layout and do away with fixed layout. This would create 
consistency between the file manager icon view and desktop icon view. We 
could do away with "clean up by name" and instead implement

arrange => by name
        => by date
        => by emblem 

etc. for manual layout. 

2. If we did the above we could than also implement windows style automatic 
layout which is a grid icon layout. Eg. Icons are always in a tight grid but 
can be rearranged as the user likes. Automatic layout could share the same 
arrange options as manual layout but there could be a check box to choose to 
use automatic or manual layout. The context menu could look like:

arrange => by name
        => by date
        => by emblem 
        [] Use manual layout

Apparently there are some issues with stretched icons and grid type layouts 
in nautilus, but i really feel icon stretching is a special case and that the 
typical use issues are more important here.

-------------------------------------
Another issue with the current nautilus icon view is that icons are not 
always kept in tight rows and columns. This makes icons appear scattered. 
This is bad. Icons should always appear in tight grids. This should always 
occur in automatic layout, and by default in manual when the user does 
arrange by name (currently clean up by name in nautilus). Of course icon 
stretching creates an issue here as well.

Opinions? I really find the current ui messy and would like to help out 
fixing it for the 2.2 to 2.4 time frame.

dave