Re: display full path in spatial nautilus

["David Adam Bordoley" <bordoley msu edu>]

Calum Benson writes:
> > using the full path leads to more confusion than gain. We lose a major 
> > benefit of the spatial browser, mainly by adding more conginitive load to 
> > interpret wtf /home/dave/folder1/documents means. 
>
> Oh I dunno, shouldn't part of the point of a spatial browser that you
> can always tell where in your folder space you happen to be?  :)  

But does /home/dave/whatever really tell a user where they are?[1] Lets look 
at the problems. First identifying an open window. With a the fullpath in 
the title the user needs to scan the whole string and interpret it, if they 
even can. Without the fullpath, the user looks at the title and just simply 
knows they are looking at "Documents." No need to compute, no mental load, 
this is the folder I'm in. This is how macos has worked forever (well at 
least through Os9, I'm not sure about osX). Now the mac also had a rather 
nice titlebar feature for moving up the filesystem hierarchy from your 
current folder as well. You could click the folder's titlebar and the whole 
directory hierarchy for the current folder would be shown in a menu. So for 
instance if you were viewing /home/dave/whatever you could click the 
titlebar to get back to dave or home or /. 

dave 

[1] Seth doesn't seem to think so either 
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/usability/2002-September/msg00014.html