Dealing with files in Gnome



The (very) recent discussion on the nautilus list[1] about whether or
not nautilus view should be editable got me thinking about the way gnome
deals with files in general. Atm we have the "Open with" menu in
nautilus which is divided into internal viewers and external
applications which can both be either viewers or editors.

There is a lot of duplication here. eg. we have internal and external
image viewers: "Open with gthumb" "Open with eog" and "Open with Image
viewer". All in all, it's less than ideal IMHO.

Maybe others greater than myself have done it before, but I stepped back
and asked myself this: "A user is looking at a folder of files, what
could they want to do with them?" There are the obvious move, delete,
rename, copy which I'm not going to go into[2]. 

Aside from those - they generally either want to view a file or edit it.
The distinction between them is really useful as it allows us to use eog
instead of the gimp when we just want to look at a picture.
I may be totally wrong about that, but If I'm not then it makes sense
to me that "Edit" and "View" be more prevelent in the general ui.

Would it not make more sense to have "View with.." and "Edit with.."
items in the nautilus context menu, than to have an "Open with.." item
with a mixture of viewers and editors, and with no obvious distinction
between them?
 
Then there is the issue of internal viewers v's external viewers.
Personally I think that nautilus should be a file manager and try to do
it well and eog should be an image viewer and do it well etc.. and they
should not overlap. I find that users get very confused when they click
on a file and then the directory they were browsing disappears. It seems
much more intuitive to me to have the file be "viewed" in a new window
and have the user close that window when they are done.

[1] along with a related discussion I had on #abiword

[2] But I do think that we should use pick up and drop
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=77293
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