Re: Nautilus patch to prevent annoying flicker during directory loading

[George J Karabin <gkarabin pobox com>]

I wonder if the hourglass is informative enough for *really* slow remote
file systems. For something like a relatively local NFS or SMB URI, a
short period with an hourglass wouldn't be much of a surprise to a user.
I've browsed SMB domains in Nautilus that take a few minutes to fully
list - I shudder to think how slow it might be over a remote connection.
Likewise, browsing directories over high-latency remote connections
could be pretty nasty as well.

So the current behavior is not just an issue of letting people use the
remote directory before it's finished loading - there's a visual
indication of progress that gives a better indication that the remote
operation is just slow, and not failing, timing out, or hung. I'm not
sure how important that perception is.

Maybe a middle ground would slow down the rate at which the directory
updates occur, so that for (typical) local directories, the update
timeout never occurs, but for really slow directories, you get a
periodic, but not jarring, update of the directory contents.

Alternately, maybe there's some other indicator that could be used in
conjunction with your patch to give a sense of (slow) progress, rather
than just an hourglass?

- George

On Sun, 2003-09-21 at 12:11, Ettore Perazzoli wrote:
> Hello!
> 
> This patch addresses one of my pet peeves with Nautilus, i.e. the fact
> that async directory loading causes continuous relayout and flickering.
> These changes make directory windows display their contents only after
> they are fully done loading.
> 
> I know the existing behavior is designed to allow the user to open files
> and directories before the directory is fully loaded (esp. if the
> directory is remote), but in practice it doesn't really work, because
> the positions of the files change continuosly on the screen at load
> time; so the icon you want to click might move before you even have a
> chance to put the pointer on it.
> 
> (A possible alternative fix could be to make it always load the files
> from gnome-vfs in the same order they are going to appear on the screen,
> to at least avoid the relayout problem, but I am not even sure that's
> possible.)
> 
> This patch is against gnome-2-4 branch on CVS.  It might be nice to make
> it change the mouse pointer to the hourglass shape during loading as
> well...  I can do that later if there is agreement on this patch.
> 
> (Please Cc: me, I am not on the list.)
> 
> -- Ettore