Re: about adding pop menu in treeview

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Mon, 2003-11-10 at 13:16, Fabio Gomes de Souza wrote:
> > 
> > I'm not sure what sort of things we want in the tree context menu. Do we
> > want all the normal ones like cut, make link and rename? If we do, we
> > might actually want that these are in the main menus too, even if the
> > main view doesn't show a directory. However, that causes lots of trouble
> 
> > for the menu operations, I mean, which selection does Edit -> Rename
> > affect, the one in the tree or the one in the main view. 
> 
> This depends on the focus. If the focus is on the tree, the action 
> regards the currently selected item in the tree. Don't know if this is 
> possible. Maybe it would be necessary to track the focus in some way. I 
> am not sure.

While technically possible I think it would be quite confusing, because
there is little visual indication of which view has the focus, and the
tree doesn't really have a normal selection, it just constantly
highlights the current directory. I don't think people will understand
what gets copied when they select file->copy.
 
> > I think the right way is for the tree view to have its own BonoboUI file
> > defining its own context menu, and then a few generic functions need to
> > be extracted from fm-directory view, for handling things like file
> > activation and file cut and paste.
> 
> I still second the other people's opinion of reusing the popup menu 
> code. IMHO it should be detached from FMDirectoryView. Actually, a lot 
> of stuff should be detached from nautilus and moved to a library with a 
> stable API.

Can you tell me exactly what part you want detatched?
real_update_menus()? That function is quite dependent on the "view one
directory" concept, and an implementation for e.g. the tree view would
look quite different.

> Nautilus should export to the other GNOME applications its ability to:
> - Manage files (move/copy/trash, etc)

gnome_vfs_xfer()

> - Discover file icons

gnome_icon_lookup ()

> - Show a popup menu for a file

Most of this is in gtk and bonoboui. You of course have to do some work
to specify exactly what this menu should contain.

> - Decide which program should be run to open a file

The gnome vfs mime system has this

> - Fetching properties of a file
> - Changing properties of files

gnome_vfs_get_file_info () and gnome_vfs_set_file_info ().
Or do you mean the properties dialog?

> - Show a FMDirectoryView
> - Show a tree

I don't think embedding part of the file manager anywhere else would be
good. However, I think most of the core code of the view/tree should be
availible to developers in the sense of easy to use tree and icon
container widgets. Currently we're a bit weak on the icon container
part.

> Nautilus-the-program would be a simple shell/frontend to this library.
> 
> This big change would:
> 1. Enrich the GNOME framework
> 2. Improve application interoperability
> 3. Increase consistency between GNOME applications by code sharing

I think we do these pretty well already.

> 4. Promote the innovation of file management in GNOME, since people 
> would be able to implement Nautilus-the-library frontends without 
> needing to reimplement the GREAT nautilus core functions.

Innovation by duplication of filemanagers? I'd rather spend my time
making the current filemanager better.

> Imagine if gThumb, for instance, was able to use same Tree as nautilus, 
> the same popup menus, the same code for moving/copying/deleting files, etc.

Personally I think it would suck pretty badly if gThumb was forced to
have an identical popup menu to Nautilus. The second one wants to add
*anything* to that menu you couldn't  use the nautilus menu anymore.
What makes sense is to export the underlying functions, and we do that
pretty well already.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's an immortal albino librarian who dotes on his loving old ma. She's a 
violent paranoid socialite who can talk to animals. They fight crime!