Re: [Fwd: Re: commit: AbiWord is now a Nautilus View.]

[Martin Sevior <msevior physics unimelb edu au>]

On Mon, 31 Mar 2003, Alexander Larsson wrote:

> On Mon, 31 Mar 2003, Dave Bordoley wrote:
> 
> > When I talked about this general issue with Nils awhile back he made a 
> > good point that if you don't support editting in these views than you 
> > are really just getting in the user's way more often than not. On the 
> > other hand, to the best of my knowledge nautilus won't default to using 
> > a view over an app, but this leads me to wonder whats the point of the 
> > view really anyway.
> 
> You keep saying it gets in the way more often than not, but you give no 
> reason or argument why this is so. In my experience files/documents are 
> read more often than they are edited/written, so I would say views that 
> view the content of files are not pointless. They are a pretty useful 
> part of browsing the filesystem.
> 
> The problem with editing in a view is that the state is so temporary. 
> Whenever you go up, back or something like that you loose all the changes 
> you made. And the sort of complicated UI needed for domain specific 
> editing of files is mostly to complex to fit nicely into the Nautilus
> window without severe conflicts and UI overload.
> 
It would be trivial (and in fact is the default behaviour) to pop up a 
dialog on dirty document (in AbiWord and almost certainly in other 
editable views) and ask if you want to save it. I don't think 
this would be confusing to the user.

Martin