Re: `New' sub-menu in desktop's rightclick-menu

[Dave Bordoley <bordoley msu edu>]

On Wed, 2002-05-22 at 16:56, Alex Larsson wrote:
> And as I said above having a create link menu that brings up a dialog 
> where you select where the link goes (file selector?) seems like a bad way 
> of doing it. Drag and Drop (with shift hold down to create a link) or 
> "Paste as Link" (for accesibility) seems like much more natural operations 
> to me.

i was thinking of links for urls like ftp links, no file selector 
necessary, (konqueror has this) better terminology is definately needed
though.

> In a perfect world $HOME as the desktop may make sense. But the fact is 
> that we live in a hetrogenous environment, and a lot of apps write random 
> stuff in $home that the user are not really interested in, and that are 
> potentially dangerous to move/remove. Therefore I don't see 
> home-as-desktop being the default in the near or medium term. I would like 
> to make the desktop directory a visible directory though.

Conversly i argue that if a file is dangerous to remove than apps
shouldn't be making these files non-hidden since even in the shell it
would be too easy to delete these. However i do not want to argue the
merit of $home as the desktop as we have discussed this about a million
times in the past, i just wanted to give some reference for my idea.

(oddly enough i discovered while perusing old bugs that $home was the
desktop originally in nautilus when using the now defunct intermediate
and advance user levels, see bug 43993 for reference)

Just to note, i think i may try to do a complete install of redhat 7.3
on a spare partition sometime and try to file bugs with every app that
doesn't use hidden files. :)

> 
> They are not only interested in $HOME. They are also interested in the 
> subdirectories of $HOME (and the folder icons for them are covered with 
> app windows), other peoples homedirs, university-course specific 
> directories, etc. 
> 

Yeah but users could just click on these folders to open them if $home
was the desktop. That was my point...but yes it doesn't make as much
sense if $home isn't the desktop, i will grant you this... 

> There is an important difference between the context menu terminal and the 
> panel terminal icon though. The context menu starts the terminal in the
> particular directory the file manager is viewing, and therefore it in some 
> sense lets you combine the best aspects of the terminal and the file 
> manager. Starting the terminal from the panel loses the context you've 
> build up in the window manager.

Uhh the context menu item new terminal always opens the terminal in
$home regardless if the user is using $home as the desktop or not, so i
don't think your statement is technically correct. I would claim having
open with...terminal for directories is more helpful. There is no new
terminal context menu in the file manager view.

I would like to recommend that we hold off on this discussion for now. I
never meant to get into a long discussion regarding my still developing
ui ideas, so sorry about that. I think everyone would agree that
concentrating on getting nautilus2 out the door should be the main focus
of our discussions right now. If anyone would like to further bounce ui
ideas around please contact me personally or comment on some of the open
nautilus bugs i have filed. 

dave