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:
> Why would someone want to create a FS device desktop file? They are 
> internal implementation specifics of how we handle mounted devices.
> 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 (konqueror has this)
etc, 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. 

> 
> I think your argument that the new window would load the same directory, 
> and therefore the new window operation is not needed is wrong though. The 
> reason you're opening a new window is probably not to navigate $home, but 
> to do some other file management that is not possible with on the desktop 
> window (because it can't change directory, because it's covered with 
> windows, because it has no menus, etc.).
> 
> 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. 
> 
> On the other hand I think $HOME is a great place to start the new window, 
> since it's often a good starting place for what you want to do, whereas 
> you basically never want to go to /. Staring in / would also force 
> newbies to immediately learn the unix one-combined-filesystem-hierarchy 
> idea, which I think makes it harder to understand initially. A lot of  
> people I know that use computers don't even really get the filesystem 
> hierarchy idea.
> 
> > however this issue obviously pushes deeper into the discussion of is
> > nautilus going to just be a file manager, or is it going to aim higher
> > and become a full desktop realization of the shell. I can't make that
> > decision, but we need to think about it.
> 
> This is just throwing around the fluffy expression "full desktop 
> realization of the shell". What does that mean, and why can't a file 
> manager be that. 
>  
> > Well at least in the file manager view, open with terminal would appear
> > in the sidebar for folders. I'm not convinced that new terminal has to
> > be in the context menu, especially when the default panel has a terminal
> > launcher on it. Why should we clutter the context menu with this when it
> > actually takes less work (one click vs. two) to launch this from the
> > panel using the launcher.
> 
> Having it in the sidebar makes some sense, although a lot of people are 
> hiding the sidebar. :)
> 
> 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.
>