Re: [Usability] Re: Patches improving tree view (multi-root and auto-follow)

[Roberto Rosselli Del Turco <rosselli ling unipi it>]

Alexander Larsson wrote:
> On Fri, 2003-06-13 at 12:05, Jürg Billeter wrote:
>
> > On Fri, 2003-06-13 at 10:43, Roberto Rosselli Del Turco wrote:
> >
> > > Jürg Billeter wrote:
>
>
> > > A possible solution could be leaving the Tree element as it is now, i.e.
> > > adding an expandable icon for every root under the folder currently
> > > pointing to / and some separators to make things more clear. Icons 
> > > should be a little bigger, too, to improve legibility.
> >
> > Perhaps it's finally really the best solution but I don't want to miss a
> > trial. Perhaps we could make the root nodes in bold text or something
> > like that.
>
>
> I also suspect that having multiple roots will be the best solution.

To make clear which nodes are roots we could rely (apart from icon 
hyerarchy/layout) on a combination of 1. specific, well designed icons 
for every root type (i.e. a disk partition, a network share, etc.) 2. 
root names highlighting in bold or using different text back-/foreground 
colors 3. separators, just to make clear that a given hyerarchy doesn't 
"continue" in the following one.

> However, that doesn't rule out that we should do some experimenting and
> thinking about alternative solution.

Ditto.

> Looking at other file managers do and what people here think it seems
> like multiple roots and tree-follows-view behaviour is the current
> "best" solution. But lets do some more thinking before finalizing this.

Consider also that, if you add more roots to the Tree view in the 
taskbar and implement tree-follows-view behaviour, you might be forced 
to do a lot of scrolling between dirs if you want to copy a file in your 
home dir to, say, a remote nfs dir, and vice versa. If you can 
drag'n'drop files between the main view and the tree view, the latter is 
more than a simple navigational helper, it's like a poor man's version 
of the split pane common to many "old school" file managers [1]. 
Implementing tree-follows-view behaviour, while at the same time adding 
multiple roots, would cripple this feature in such a way as to make it 
from very unconvenient to pretty useless. It would be acceptable if 
Nautilus were to get a split pane view, but I suspect this isn't 
happening any time soon (unfortunately...).

[1] It probably isn't a coincidence that I use Gentoo when I have lots 
of files to copy/move ... ah, the good days of Directory Opus on the 
Amiga ;)

Ciao

--
Roberto Rosselli Del Turco      e-mail:	rosselli at cisi.unito.it
Dipartimento di Scienze			rosselli at ling.unipi.it
del Linguaggio			Then spoke the thunder	DA
Universita' di Torino		Datta: what have we given?  (TSE)

  Hige sceal the heardra,     heorte the cenre,
  mod sceal the mare,       the ure maegen litlath.  (Maldon 312-3)