Disclosure triangle behaviour (one user's feedback)

[Darryl Rees <rees netnam vn>]

It appears that the real and desired behaviour of the disclosure 
triangles (wrt empty folders) within the folders sidebar changed with 
the resolution of bug 43608.

Personally however I find the current behaviour to be annoying and 
unusual from a ui design perspective. Currently, empty folders show a 
disclosure triangle - which when clicked opens the directory to show 
'empty'... a waste of time, especially in sparsely populated trees. IMHO 
if there is nothing to disclose there should not be a disclosure control.

The cited reason for the current behaviour is that the disclosure 
triangle is a visual cue for directories that have a non-standard icon. 
I would like to argue that this is an extreme corner case - think about 
it, it's only a problem if all of the following simultaneously apply:
(1) You are using the folders sidebar with 'show only folders' turned off.
(2) The folder is empty
(3) The folder has a non-standard icon. (arguably an imprudent thing to 
do - if you specify an alternate icon for a folder that looks nothing 
like a folder, then either you are being purposely obfuscatory or 
deserve what you get...)

Further, it would only be a problem if you were searching around for a 
particular empty directory in which you wanted to put new files, and 
were not entirely sure of the identity of that directory. Seems peverse 
to me.

Moreover,
(1) I've never seen this behaviour in other file-outliners.
(2) In the main file-viewing canvas there is no such visual cue for 
folders, which is arguably a bigger problem.
(3) The 'Empty' indicator is misleading - the folder is most probably 
not *empty* at all, but simply has no subfolders.

OK, it just seems sub-optimal to me.

While on the subject of disclosure triangles, a couple of other 2c 
worth. The triangles themselves are quite small and fiddly to click on. 
It would me much nicer to be able to double-click anywhere on a folder 
name to open it (as per ms explorer) or something similar.

The last point is that I find outliners much clearer and less fatigueing 
when the disclosure control is directly below the folder and the left 
edge of the subfolders is to the right of the right edge of the parent 
folder. gmc was particularly bad in this regard, from memory nautilus 1 
got it right, and nautilus 2 seems to have regressed somewhat.

I'd be semi-surprised if there have not been studies into this area, but 
can't find anything on the net. Hope this user-feedback is useful to 
somebody.

Cheers,
Darryl Rees.